You know that feeling you get when you’re angry with your life and the world? The one that makes you sick of everything, that makes you feel like simultaneously roaring with your entire being and crying with what little is left of your sapped energy? You know that feeling, the one that makes you want …
Category Archives: self-improvement
Had We But Time Enough
Working on Bella’s Bookshelves has made me read more about the publishing world in general. All I read these days are the incredibly copious obits of indie bookshops and the constant proclamations of how ereaders and ebooks are revolutionizing our reading habits and bookselling trends. One of the pros of ereaders, apparently, is that they …
A Proper Place for Tea
I sip my tea the way you’re supposed to when tasting it (did you know you’re supposed to slurp?), but only because I’m trying to drown out the song on the radio. I am sitting conspicuously at my desk at the clinic, grossly aware of the diminutive elderly patient waiting across from me and the …
Close Your Eyes and Think of England
At the desk that’s too high for you, in a wobbly dining table chair, you pick at your nails, massage your tight neck, and listen to the pop songs on the radio in the reception room, wondering at and irritated by the constant repetition of uninspired stanzas. You pokes holes in your eraser with your …
Looking Glass Friend
I’ve been having a strange week. Last Friday I had the day off, which I really did mean to spend proofreading since I have a nice big job due on the 21st, but which I instead spent in several chairs for several hours at a hair salon. Since November, I’ve changed my hairstyle four times …
Running for Peace of Mind
Meditation, the kind where you just sit or lie still and breathe deeply and try to empty your mind or focus on one thing for a while, is really hard for me. I can’t do it. It seems an invitation for my mind to start leaping everywhere as if in defiance, and then I just …
I Am All I’ve Done
I sit before the living room picture window, outside which falls Christmas snow; heavy, completely vertical lines of large clumped flakes fall fastthicksilent, and I’m suddenly reminded of peacefully watching the same thing year after year in different places, at different times — last year, the year before, when I was 20, when I was …
Rocking Chair Musing
I’m sitting in my rocking chair in our cozy living room bathed in tree lights and a warm lamp glow, soft classical music in the background. Classical 96.3 fm, to be precise. I mention it because this station has been the soundtrack to my life: I’ve listened to it since I was a very young …
I Miss You — And Me
It’s an hour past my bedtime (according to Ayurvedic practice and my common sense), and I’m sitting in the gezellig (Dutch for cozy, more or less, but even cozier than cozy!) dreamy light of the Christmas tree we put up last weekend. But before I log off my computer I need to just put something …
Pilgrim’s Progress
Today has been a strange day. It’s rained since this morning, and the light is bizarre, both pink and dark. It’s felt like evening all day. Kind of mimics my mood, to tell the truth: slightly dark, but with pink in it — meaning, I think, that there is hope… I can feel something happening …