I called my 91-year-old grandfather to wish him happy birthday and the phone went first to voicemail. I was unprepared to hear my grandmother's voice still on the machine nearly two years after her death. When he got to the phone mid-message I was almost disappointed; there was something about the quality of her voice, the pitch and timbre of it, that I desperately wanted to hear again.
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I am relieved that the Supreme Court has effectively made gay marriage legal in California, but am very disappointed in Scalia's summary of the Voting Rights Act earlier this week. Sometimes it feels like American progress is a fickle thing. It definitely is a slow thing. Luckily, it is a thing.
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Ryan and I have officially started our dog search. We have been talking about adopting a dog for over a year, but it wasn't until recently that we began filling out applications on Bay Area rescue sites. We got close earlier this week, when a representative from a local shelter sent us some pictures of a Nova Scotia duck trolling retriever, a brown shaggy guy who looked like he'd fit well at the end of our bed or snuggled in our tent on a camping trip. Someone else must have thought so too, because by early the next morning, he'd already been adopted.
I don't really mind, though, because this gives us more time to dream up the very best dog name in the history of dog names.
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I've been waiting for a woman like Senator Wendy Davis.
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While cleaning out our bookshelf I came across Danzy Senna's latest story collection, You Are Free . I bought the book two years ago, while attending her writing class at the Tomales Bay Writer's Workshop, and I'd somehow misplaced it amidst a stack of grad school reading. I had forgotten how effortless her writing is, how seamless, how it is driven so clearly by ideas, but still somehow manages to surprise you in its subtle tricks and maneuvers. Her debut novel, Caucasia, is still one of the best novels I've read in recent years, and though this collection has a different tone, a different pace, and a different intention, it is still undeniably her voice, the voice of a writer still obsessed with the same cultural phenomena, yet somehow able to return to the same themes with a more mature, textured voice.
I am always grateful for the writers who remind me why I read.
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Wise words from my mother, the one and only Lyra Halprin: "The best thing about being a writer is that you can do anything, be anyone, and then you can write about it." On days when work feels long, when the cubicle walls feel like they beginning to cave, when, frankly, I am just tired of testing my blood sugar, when someone near to me says something I never want to forget, something I'd like painted on a flag that I can wave whenever I need, I can always, always, trust that there is a way, some way, to make it all meaningful. I live for that very pursuit.