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A Video Game Review: The Plucky Squire, Plus Some Thoughts About Other Video Games I’ve Played
Before our attempt at Terra Mystica, my spouse sat me down to watch a fifteen-minute YouTube tutorial on how to play it. About five minutes in, I asked him at which point the game was supposed to start being fun. Eight hours into Twilight Imperium, I finally forfeited when I fell asleep face down on the floor.
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Confessions of a Volunteer Lighthouse Keeper: Tawas Point 2024
I thought a lot about rule-breaking and coincidence this summer. As I've worked on writing my memories from my Michigan trip, these are the themes I've tried to connect to the details. I've pulled a little from each vignette I've written so far, to give a glimpse into each story.
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On Earthquakes, Essays, Publications, and Podcasts (and Missing California Me)
Trading spaces with the version of myself that refused to follow my then-fiance-now-spouse and his new job back to Utah—a version of myself who moved to LA instead to haunt open mics and write and find a way to survive while applying to grad schools—is a fantasy I dwell on about as much as I do the one in which I moved back East on a lacrosse scholarship after high school and discovered my atheism and bisexuality much sooner than I finally would.
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“You’d Make a Good Bishop’s Wife”: When a Compliment Starts Sounding Like an Insult in Hindsight
A bishop’s wife (a bishop is always married, and to a woman) is held to a certain standard by association. Her role is to support her husband not just with her willingness to come second after the congregation, but by demonstrating to the other women in their ward what it means to be an exemplary “helpmeet.”
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On Weirdness and Play: Or an Ode to the Creative Haven That Was My Uncle’s House
I stared up at my second grade teacher with a probably drifting eye, probably long tangled brown hair, maybe even wearing the XXL shirt with the giant printed cow on the front I loved so much around this time. And the way she responded to me has never left my brain in thirty years.
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Atomic Habits Revisited: A Two-Year Late Update on My 2021 Goals
I’ve re-embraced the promise of Atomic Habits since my first read-through–that by changing and directing my habits in their minutiae, by changing my systems, I’ll get where I want to go, and continue becoming who I want to be.
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In Which I Explain to My Goddaughter (and Myself) What It Means to Have (and Be) a Godmother
When close friends asked my partner and I to be godparents to their daughter, the four of us got to decide what the relationship would mean to us.
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[My Upanishad] Something I Wrote in a Class I Almost Didn’t Take Because It Was Called Lit of the Sacred
Years ago I signed up for a class at Utah Valley University called “Literature of the Sacred,” specifically because my first instinct was to dismiss it. I reconsidered. This wasn’t BYU, after all, and the course description didn’t read like Seminary or Institute (the school-adjacent religious courses I attended as a high school student and during my first semester as an undergrad back in the early 00s). Maybe this class would help cleanse the bitterness mormonism had left on my tongue for words like “sacred,” “faith,” and “prayer.” Maybe it would be a good companion course to the work I was doing in therapy. I thought of all my classes…
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A Eulogy for My Grandpa
This is a version of the eulogy I wrote for my mom's dad this past year. I read this to my relatives during his graveside service. It includes excerpts from journals he wrote during the LDS mission he served in 1951, which is where he met my grandma. I didn't read this exact version at his graveside though. The eulogy I actually read was edited to remove superfluous details about my personal life and experiences. Those I'll share here, on my personal blog.
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“Atomic Habits” by James Clear and the Self-Care Ritual of Routine: Or How I Plan to Process 2020
I find a lot of comfort in routine, controlling the things I can control when so much of the outside world feels and is so broken. My emotional stamina is currently finite and fleeting, so I have to spend it wisely or risk losing, hours, days, whatever to debilitating anxiety, which brings me to the point of this post: self-care.
