The Tonga Room at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco looks like Pirates of the Caribbean meets the Tiki Room--and it rains indoors! (photo below from the site)

Even a Late-Night Line Counts

With an hour left of May twenty-second, I have to decide whether to write champagne and ice-cream sandwiches, Bed-Bath-and-Beyond in a fit of organization, paper mache with 4th and 5th graders, or crocheting in anticipation of my cousin's soon-to-be-born baby boy; apparently, my command of punctuation makes it so I can mention them all.

One Line a Day

I've decided to start a new project. I'm calling it something lame: One Line a Day. It's inspired by  my desire to buy a new journal.

The Beginning: 
I really like buying notebooks and journals. The first page of a new journal makes me feel inspired, as if the page pulses with potential.

The Conflict: 
After I write on that first new page, the whole journal feels old. And I have to go buy a new one, because I want to feel the adrenaline rush of empty lines.

I have a collection of mostly-blank notebooks: all of which have writing on the first one or two pages.

The Seed:
I found a journal, called "One Line a Day." My irrational self wants to buy the journal. My rational self is afraid it will end up like the others.

But it's just so beautiful. 

It has a line for every day of the year: 

room enough to write one sentence--One Line--

for each day. For five years.

 (journal pic from Pottery Barn)

The Compromise:


I resist the impulse buy. Instead, I give myself a trial period.

Kind of like when I wanted a cat in elementary school and my mom made me prove I could take care of something by committing to cleaning my room and bathroom everyday for a month.

I prove to myself that I will use the One Line a Day Journal, by using my blog as my "One Line a Day." For a month, I'll blog one line a day. If I can do it, I get the journal. If I can't, I have to pretend I did and start filling up all those neglected notebooks sitting in the bottom of our closet.

We got that cat. I'm gonna get me that journal.

Things I Wish I Could Have #1: Magical Reading Nooks

These Kids have it all

I officially have a Master's Degree. Yeah. That means ....







Your guess is as good as mine.

2 AM

for no good reason, other than the reasons
which keep me up, when everyone else
is sleeping.

Words I otherwise would have said
stick, on my tongue. Peanut butter
words, the kind with the nuts on the inside,
the kind you have to stir when the oil
separates.

I sometimes feel separate, too.

I would put a question here, a hypothetical
something to suggest a theme.
A motif. A common thread.

I am a well-punctuated sentence
without parenthetical asides.
The sticky things
stay stuck.

"If fiction is to be truthful about what human beings really are and do, we have to define knowledge as a goal of the imagination."

Ursula Le Guin, Making your Fiction Truthful