I can't get water to sit still.

If I could have made Ben's wedding all about me and spent a full hour giving a toast, it might have gone like this. 

With one eye closed, measuring the beak, she said, “Daniel asked me earlier, ‘Why does it have to be right?’ And I think that’s a very good question.” 

When I got home, I wondered if the coyote crossing my path could have been some kind of omen or symbol or indication of what I ought to expect in my life.

Saturday — the day of Chicago's Bud Billiken Parade — was a cake-taking day of sorts; one of the best days of the entire year. 

Oscar Wilde said, “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

I’m sitting in a corner at the Portland International Airport getting ready to fly back to Chicago, Illinois. 

Recently, my mom dug up her high school diaries. She left one out on the counter in our kitchen next to the toaster; this morning I read it over breakfast. 

Actually, as I am reflecting now from my high “I’m-a-real-writer” perch (on which, it should be noted, I am perfectly terrified), I think that maybe I just needed to be writing. 

I am on a train again. A train is my favorite place to be in the entire world. I know this now for sure because we just set out and my heart crushed in on itself and now I’m sitting at a booth in the lounge car smile-sobbing so hard someone came up to me and said, “You seem like you’re at a wedding, but I just wanted to check and see if you are ok.” I hugged that person. She left quickly. 

My friend George did an artist talk for our writing class last week in which he said something along the lines of (and I will not be able to write it as eloquently here), I understand that this is not fate; that this is a normal coincidence. But I don’t understand why one is considered more incredible or important than the other.

This year I sat writing, listing, deleting, pacing, obsessively drawing, and feeling generally unable to deliver a piece of decent writing. After it was done I said, “I feel like I just gave birth, and I don’t even like the baby."

I think that it makes sense to commemorate my thirtieth trip around the globe with a huge, loud LOVE FEST. Here goes.

I have a recurring nightmare about a jolly, anthropomorphized wasp befriending me before sucking all of my memories out of my ears. “How do you feel?” The wasp says. I feel like I don’t want to hurt the wasp’s feelings, so I don’t tell him that I am empty and scared. I can remember my name and my mom’s face, but that’s all. I say, “I don’t feel as bad as I think you thought I would feel,” and then I pat the jolly wasp on his head.

Yesterday the cartoonist and legendary demigod Lynda Barry taught my comics class. I had been looking forward to this day with a kind of sickness: I didn’t want the day to come because I enjoyed looking forward to it so much; when it was over, what was I supposed to look forward to? Now that the day has come and gone, I can answer that question with some confidence: Post-Lynda Barry, I am looking forward to, enthusiastically, the rest of my life.

You know those really big moments in your life — the ones that act like vertexes on angles? You know: The shifts; the places where before this moment everything was one way, and afterwards, everything was another way. Common examples from literature, film, and lectures mothers give daughters are: the first night you sleep at someone else’s house; the day you get your first period; the first time you can’t eat off a children’s menu at a restaurant; your first kiss (and your first devastating break-up); when you go to college; the birth of your first child. For me, one of the most seminal moments like that came when I was finally allowed to ride the city bus by myself. This happened over the summer the year after eighth grade.

When you move to Chicago, here is what people say to you: “Oh, whoa! Did you know it’s cold there?” They don’t usually phrase it as a question, but they say it like you have overlooked this fact. It’s as though they think they are announcing something particularly newsworthy that you, in your blind lust for a big city, have overlooked.