Two paintings at the end of a semester thinking about birds.

There is this notion that you are supposed to do things perfectly the first time; a sense that mistakes are so terrible that they signal that the very task at hand has been a total bust. 

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.