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Two steps forward and one back

I was plunging into my to do list today that made it seem like someone had turned up the treadmill by about 1000 notches. Seriously. I couldn’t catch my breath because the big rock on my chest felt like a boulder that an elephant was sitting on. Victory lap – there is a good chance I will be able to refinance the house (check), I was able to use a free ticket for an upcoming…

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Svaha! Kapara!

The weekend respite was good for me, but I came back to the stress ball that I can’t seem to extricate from my throat. I formulated a plan for work that at least gave me some satisfaction and now am ready to execute. My horoscope today was perfect for this part of my life: July 12, 2011 Taurus (4/20-5/20) Things are improving in your work or school life, in part because you are taking a…

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Nantucket dreams

I sailed away this weekend to Nantucket on what has become an annual retreat. I gained more laugh lines, I traded pounds of worry for pounds of delicious treats, I reverted to the little girl who lives in me and loves a good time with good friends. To find a friend is rare, to find a group of them is nigh impossible, but I, dear readers, fell into a bowl of milk when in 2006…

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Temporarily stepped out to see what condition my condition is in

What the Mapmaker Knows O is the ocean and t the consequence of time at the edge of a landscape of dots plotted into the plane with a constant scale. Any place can be located and later divided by cultural and social data and sketched on a napkin—disregarding distance and leaving only the little one knows. Description is reductive: a shirt on the back, buttons on the front, a mind that is willing to enact its…

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State of the Union

I’m going to take a much needed respite from myself because I have come this far and I’m bewildered by life. As our summer vacation approaches, I’m once again at a high pitch, a frenzy I seem to have a talent for working myself into around this time. It comes from feeling like I have to do it all with alacrity that rivals the velocity and speed of something only a physicist might imagine. Then…

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Free falling

I dreamed the other night that I was buying tickets for a marching band and had left Tin in the car and three ladies abducted him and I was running as fast I could after him but not moving and woke screaming Tiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnn! A friend, who spent half his life with his partner, is visiting us because he is on a friend hopping trip in the U.S. after his partner died of cancer last year.…

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Astounding

In that pendulum of life, sometimes it is actually refreshing to hit bottom. Down there in the quagmire, covered in yuck, you realized just how good a hot shower feels, you suddenly see clearer that the chains that bind you are of your own making, and what you realize is that perhaps you have found a way to negotiate the “quiet life of desperation” that all of us live. In a telephone conversation with a…

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Some good news for the hood

MAPLE STREET BOOK SHOP EXPANDING TO BAYOU ST JOHN AND MARIGNY As seen on their Twitter and WordPress: Historic Uptown literary establishment, Maple Street Book Shop, is soon to expand into two additional historic New Orleans neighborhoods, Faubourg St. John and Faubourg Marigny. The Faubourg Marigny shop will be located within The New Orleans Healing Center at 2732 St. Claude Avenue and will be open for business in late June. The Faubourg St. John location is at 3141 Ponce…

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Loosening up the noose

Isn’t it odd that yesterday on the anniversary of this country’s freedom from its oppressor, I was feeling more trapped than ever? How strange. I went to yoga and guess what the message was – freedom – how coincidental, not. Freedom is the right to change our mind even about something we have decided on and yesterday when we were going over all our options here at the LaLa that ranged from all three of…

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