the big one

I think the thing that people fear so much about California natural disasters is that they are so immediate. There is no warning for when “the Big One” is coming. You can wake up to your entire neighborhood on fire, have to leave all of your belongings behind in an instant. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived […]

inheritance

From my father, I inherited his eating habits. Chewing through one item on the plate at a time, finishing one before starting the next. “Does your father still do that?” my mother’s mother says when she notices my actions. Smashing the baked potato out of its skin and turning it into mashed. Why make a […]

precipice

we are all, individually, nearing or distancing ourselves from our own precipices. fascinating as the edge is, I keep myself as far from it as possible, in whatever way that may be. I have a long history of self-preservation that’s kept me from falling over the precipices of my own life, but I have also […]

helmet

I spent four years trying to do a single reverse dive, and it never happened. not once. a reverse is one of five categories of dives, the others being forward, backward, inward, and twists. in it, you stand on the board facing the water, take your two to four steps forward, and then throw yourself […]

all my dreams are a summation of my mistakes

no notebook has ever felt secure enough for thoughts inside of my head, for my fears and insecurities—if I read every word my eyes glance upon, surely others do as well—no word processor or email server, I trust internet databases with my bank account password and the answers to my security questions but the danger […]

The Slow Demise of my attention span

Somewhere along the way, my attention span suffered a sluggish downward spiral, like an angel with one broken wing. As a child, I sat in my south-facing bedroom, already poorly lit during the day, and read long past when the sun had sunk low on the other side of the house, and I squinted at […]

Pompeii and the inevitability of oblivion

I’d never been to Italy until this spring, when, after my mother saying for literally my entire life that we would go to Italy next summer, we finally made it across the Atlantic. I didn’t have a passport until March, when I drove out to Glendale to stand in line for three hours, text my […]