what not to say when someone is quitting smoking

I’m going to just skip to the punchline of this story, which is that you don’t say, “Make sure you don’t gain weight now that you’re not smoking, because that would CLEARLY be REALLY bad.” Don’t worry, no one said this to me recently.  There is probably no one in my life at this point [...]

Not smoking

I’ve tried to quit smoking before.  Depending on your definition, I have quit smoking before several times.  Once I stopped for over a year.  But clearly, at some point I started again.  A week ago, I began the process of quitting again.  I started wearing the nicotine patch (and I’ve discovered that my right leg [...]

things I’m thinking about and yoga

Part I: Things I am currently obsessed with: – The power of looking – the gaze, what it means if that’s how you’re recognized as queer?  Is that a kind of power that I want?  Is it active or passive (or something else)?  How much I look and what kind of desire is behind it?  [...]

taking a little stock

I just turned 30.  That is incredibly strange.  I can’t remember where I was when I turned 20, but that’s not really a surprise since I have a terrible memory.  I know it was during the year I took off from college and I was living in a tiny city teaching kindergarten. In the last [...]

More (again)

Ok, clearly I am rusty at this, because I just wrote a short post, tried to publish it, and somehow only one random sentence got published.  And I hadn’t saved the text anywhere.  Luckily, it was a pretty simple post. Like everyone else with an abandoned blog, I’ve resolved to start writing here more.  In [...]

Small Desires

I want to talk about depression and desire. Let me back up first and describe what kind of depression I’m talking about.  I have been seriously depressed for over ten years.  I find it terrifying (and dreadfully depressing) to say that.  It has ebbed and flowed, worsened and improved, throughout that time, but it has [...]

content production

I’ve been really disappointed this week with all kinds of content: the pronouncements of writers at the annual Brookyn book festival, a story on This American Life, a Morning Edition story, the most recent hate-filled article from Michael Pollen, the lecture content of professors I interpret for. Especially that last one. It’s been grating on [...]

Election Conversations

First, my apologies for starting a blog and then completely abandoning it.  I plan on posting again, though I’m making no promises.  I haven’t done this in so long that I accidentally made this a new page instead of a regular post.  That’s now been corrected.  Now that is out of the way, on to [...]

exposure

I am suddenly fascinated by the stats page for this blog. For the 5 days of this blogs existence it has gotten steadily between 35 and 45 hits a day, which I find amazing since all I did to tell anyone about it was put it up as my gchat tagline and on livejournal. I’m [...]

Love = boring

Logan asked if I would also be writing about love here, since she noticed it is not on my list of potential topics. I was surprised to realize my answer was probably not, that I’m not really interested in writing about love, especially not love in a romantic/sexual relationship (the ways I fall in and [...]