Story time

The formal quality of experience through time is inherently narrative.

Stephen Crites, "The Narrative Quality of Experience," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 

Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories... Narrative imagining is our fundamental form of predicting [and our] fundamental cognitive instrument for explanation.

Mark Turner, The Literary Mind

Narrative Medicine

I think I'm going to apply to the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia!

http://ce.columbia.edu/narrative-medicine

Pas de Deux

Looking back at the unplanned hodgepodge of dance, literature, and music in my life, I realize that I can't be a doctor without this creative aspect, despite remaining forever an amateur in each field. The middle of my residency was as close as I'd ever come to drowning in the morass of medicine. To be whole, I somehow need both—the two serpents entwined in the medical caduceus symbol, partners in pas de deux.

Danielle Ofri, Pas de Deux 

needing to write

I saw Ben. We were in a coffeeshop in Lake Forest. It was Starbucks. Do you remember, you had asked him while driving when he could drink coffee. He said eighteen. You asked where. He said Starbucks. And there he stood, smiling at me, reminiscent of you. Then I woke up.

on a wish and a fear

Old School

No true account can be given of how or why you became a writer, nor is there any moment of which you can say: This is when I became a writer. It all gets cobbled together later, more or less sincerely, and after the stories have been repeated they put on the badge of memory and block all other routes of exploration. There's something to be said for this. It's efficient, and may even provide a homeopathic tincture of the truth. --From Old School by Tobias Wolff 

Coleridge the Runaway

"No one on earth has ever LOVED me," he later wrote.

Anne Fadiman, At Large and at Small

Chapter Eight

There are trails to walk in the woods and rules that say if you pass someone during the day you may simply drop your gaze to the path as a signal you are thinking seriously about your work and do not wish to engage in conversation.

Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty 

I saw Ben. We were in a coffeeshop in Lake Forest. It was Starbucks. Do you remember, you had asked him while driving when he could drink coffee. He said eighteen. You asked where. He said Starbucks. And there he stood, smiling at me, reminiscent of you. Then I woke up. 

on a wish and a fear

I used to write here more often.

Senior shout out

found while digging through past documents

“But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time.” --Annie Dillard

Dear mommy & daddy--words cannot suffice what you are to me. Thank you for being there half a world away. I love you. Dear Joseph--did you know that I love you too? I’ll miss you. Dear Auntie--thank you for the laughter and conversations. I’ll remember them always. Dear Mrs. Delaney--you’re the best advisor with the best caxy-ful office! I love you and I’ll miss you. Dear my Lady Advisory--I’m going to miss our bagel mornings and pasta dinners! Dear my swim team girls--had the best season with you guys getting out the pool like an athlete and being “too sexy for a sport that requires clothes”! Dear Eric--you’re my best and favorite coach. Thank you for believing in me both inside the pool and out. Dear Jennifer--you’re my second mom. Loved our morning workouts and eighth period swims and Panera/car/living room talks. Love you. Dear my Bible study girls & Cody & Rich-- “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). I love you guys. I’ll miss our Wednesday nights! Dear Mrs. Plambeck--you’re the best voice teacher, Bible study leader, and hugger. Thank you for teaching me music and letting me love it. I love you more. Dear Mr. Plambeck, Foos (Go Big Green!), Vanessa & musical cast--you guys made my favorite musical extra special! Dear Dr. C--thank you for the two years of chemistry, HEAT meetings, and baking in your lovely kitchen! I’ll miss your contagious energy and laughter. Dear Mrs. Bell--you’re the best person I met at LFA. You made me love literature without telling me to. I love you and I miss you. Dear Rickey and Arwah and Ms. Asher--loved working with you guys for litmag! “Submit to me.” Dear Emily--thank you for the long emails and late phonecalls. Love you. Dear Jenna--fellow swim captain & advisory buddy, I’m going to miss you so much! Dear Jack--loved our morning meetings together! You’re the best Rolf. Dear Ellena--best neighbor and artist, I’m going to hang your paintings on my wall. Dear the ladies of Ferry Hall--thank your for your legacy and letting me carry it. I’ll always remember. Dear you--if you’ve read until here and your name’s still not here, I love & miss you all the more. Dear Chris--thank you for your smile. I could never forget you. Love you always. 

The best diet

The best diet is the one you don't know you're on.

Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think

your mailbox

     In regard to the poems I left with you; will you be so kind as to return them to me at my new address? And without bothering to coment upon them if you should find that embarrassing--for it was the human situation and not the literary one that motivated my phone call and visit.

    William Carlos Williams, Paterson

A Piece of Advice

If you love her she will break

your heart

If you don’t,

you will break 

mine. 

Symptom list / 2nd half of 2011~1st half of 2012

brokenheartedness insomnia migraines etherealdreamsofJ uncontrollablecrying depression suicidalthoughts grief disillusionment emotionalstress nostalgia cynicism insecurity homesickness indigestion anorexiabulemia feelingoflosing claustrophobia

Seeing You

She was asleep on my shoulder. I wanted to wake her, ask her, Excuse me, haven’t you missed your stop? But the ticket she held in her hand said, no, not until the very last. Her hair tickled my chin and for a moment I thought she smelled like Elle. Lavender soap and soft water. 

I had another half hour left to the city in which I had loved. She’s got another man but enough time and distance stood between us. I was going there to meet my buddy from boarding school. We were on the debate team and had roomed together. Seeing her came as an afterthought, a secondary business. 

Her father’s business was quite lucrative. Hedge fund, it was called. He was my height, an older version of a J. Crew model. He was not good-looking but there was a charm in his speech and eyes that made you think he was. Handsome, even. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to make people believe I was better than they thought. I studied his jaw as he chewed his food, the dignity he leaned back with in any stiff chair, his unassuming gait of an athlete. Once I saw his empty cologne bottle in the trash and noted the Italian brand. I tried to laugh like him, and I tried not to think of my dad with his glasses propped on his forehead, asking me where they were. It was an old game we used to play when I was a kid. Dad pretended he couldn’t see anything and I’d come to his rescue, say, Dad, they’re on your forehead! After he died I pretended he was invisible. As a memento I kept his glasses and his corrected vision became my inheritance. The people in my life appeared smaller than they were, a virtual image through a pair of diverging lens. 

—

I tried to stretch. The girl’s head was heavy and my shoulder was asleep. In her closed eyelids I could see the purple veins. Following one downstream I found a scar, just under the left eye next to her nose. When she cries the scar will collect her tears. When she wakes up the ticket will still be in her hand and her head on my shoulder and she will ask, Excuse me, haven’t you missed your stop?

I missed Elle. I missed that rainy morning in Grant Park when she took off my wet glasses and traced her finger over my brow. “What do you see,” she said, “in me?” I could only tell that her face was hers and that she had my glasses on. She wanted to see as I saw, a corrected vision reduced in scale. I closed my eyes. The rain was falling hard on the umbrella. To not see her at all was better than to see her fading, blurring in the rain, drowned out. “Hmm?” She asked. Her finger was on my temple, cold, then along my ear. “You look like a dream,” she stated. “Familiar and unrecognizable.” She meant I was becoming more like her dad. She stopped her tracing. The rain and the faint traffic along Michigan Avenue was all I heard. I felt the heat of her body as she drew closer, as if to whisper something in my ear. No, she was leaning in to kiss me. Of course. “I wish you were real,” she told me as her nose touched mine. Her breath was warm, her face a pixelation in my mind. There was a picture I took that moment just before the kiss pressed like a camera shutter. It was something I learned from Dad—to imagine inside your eyes without seeing. But when I opened them her hair was dampened dark and the rain had stopped. I felt a claustrophobic suspension. She had sneezed instead. Elle was like that. Ruined the moment only she could ruin. “Bless you,” I finally said. 

—

I was looking out the window when the girl on my shoulder stirred, rubbed her eyes. She shot up. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She wiped the drool from her mouth with the hand that held her ticket. She reminded me of my buddy, how he would also flush red when he lost a debate. He wore mismatched socks and bow ties and managed not to look funny. He ruffled his hair when he was nervous and chewed mint because he couldn’t smoke. He took the longest showers in the mornings when no other boy in the dorm was awake. I knew he was thinking in there, with the water falling on his head. He was trying to forget me, how I had changed his mind about Elle and that I had loved her too. He tried to forget the books I had given her shelved in her room, my glasses she wore to magnify her eyes, the flat tone she used to tease him that was mine. 

When my shoulder was no longer asleep the girl had gotten off the train and I had missed my stop. 


Also published by Dartmouth's The Stonefence Review at
http://stonefencereview.com/2012/05/seeing-you/

Carrot cake

You taste sweet on my burnt tongue.

Under construction

I'm under construction. Don't try and find me because you won't.

Call it a writer's block, recession, tsunami. Give it some other name besides my own. And if one day you see me on the street, don't pretend to know her either.

An attempt at justifying my not having written anything here for nearly two months. 

Symptom Recital

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the gentlest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me anymore.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men...
I'm due to fall in love again.

Dorothy Parker, "Symptom Recital"

This poem is me, save the last line. 

I was eating vanilla ice cream, bottomed with frozen m&m's and topped with sliced bananas. Guilty of my gluttonous pleasure (my consumption of the melting solid took place on my bed), I picked up the poetry anthology by my window in hope to garner some sophistication. Instead I found my symptoms listed as if in a medical journal written by Dr. Seuss.

Look at what you've done.