Finding the rhythm of “enough" and “try harder” has always been a difficult balance for me. 

An overdue realization hit me: The day when I became Craft Girl Fantasy was never going to come. My precious stacks of scrapbooking paper weren’t doing anyone any favors in these forgotten drawers.

The small things you can do (make caramel! make sushi! fix bikes! fix pipes!) to make your life feel more interesting and valuable. 

Honestly, there’s really nothing better than when someone asks me to draw something for them. Drawing makes me feel good; it makes me happy. When I don’t have to think of something to draw myself, because someone gives me a photograph to work off of, it is a huge relief. 

How one of the worst days of my semester became one of the best days of my life. 

The comically terrible culmination of an unbelievably rough semester.

This little literary journal became a home for an unbridled fury of cat drawings. 

I've been working on this essay about owls for over a year now, which means I've cut almost everything I had written at first out of it completely. 

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.