I’m Bad Good Writer
6/25/26
I’ve been writing in some capacity for most of my life. I remember how I used to write my own newspaper on my dad’s Window’s ‘95 PC when I was in middle school. I remember dozens of half-started stories and ideas throughout the decades, the short stories I would write as school assignments, the essays I would often submit. I even wrote on an old typewriter I got from a consignment shop once. Because of this interest and how long I have spent honing the skill, I’d like to think that I’m a fairly good writer. Not the best, of course, but far from the worst. I can generally get my ideas across in a written format, and English was pretty much my best subject in school. The trouble with being good at writing is, I’m also terrible at it.
Not the writing element itself, but rather the actual act of sitting down to write something, of completing what I’ve started. I truly cannot count how many half done scripts, stories, and drafts I have floating around. Some I haven't touched in years, some I’ve forgotten completely. Even now as I write this blog post there are a host of other things I’m tempted to abandon it for. Recently, I broke past a months-long writer’s block that had been holding back a story I’d been toying with for over a year. Since then, I’ve been more motivated to work on it since it feels less like I’m hitting a wall, but even then I have trouble maintaining focus.
That’s one reason I’ve started blogging again. I think I said in the last one that writing was like building up a muscle. You need resistance to grow stronger, and pushing past the urge to put off writing or surrender my faculties to ChatGPT is part of that resistance. I find that just sitting down and writing, even if I don't start off knowing exactly what to say, is good exercise. Often the words flow from me more easily when I don’t give myself the pressure of knowing exactly what I’m saying ahead of time. I often use these blogs as part self-reflection exercise and partly as a warm-up of sorts. Perhaps that sounds silly, but it really does seem to help. And with time, I’m hopeful the blogs will become longer and more consistent. For now though we’re shooting for something semi-consistent.
I don’t have a pithy line to end this one on. Until next time!
Patience is a Virtue
6/16/26
I am writing this on my six-year-old Chromebook while sitting in a local coffee shop and hoping the Lactaid I took kicks in soon enough for me to not regret getting whole milk instead of almond in my dirty chai. When I went to order my drink, the line was longer than usual. These all may seem like extraneous details or even TMI, but just let me cook for a moment.
You see, I struggle with being patient. I truthfully always have, and I’m certain that growing up with undiagnosed ADHD did little to help matters. But in the last 10 to 15 years I think society at large has experienced a marked shift in our ability to appreciate delayed gratification. Today, we want things fast. Not just fast, instantaneous. I’m old enough to remember when it was perfectly ordinary to wait 2-5 minutes for a webpage to load, maybe get up and get a drink or run to the restroom while you waited. Now I find myself getting frustrated if it takes more than a couple of seconds.
I promise I’m not trying to give a tedious “back in my day” speech here. I think it can be just as dangerous to idolize the past as the future, and there are many reasons to be glad that technology works faster now, but I do think there’s something to be said for the value of giving oneself time to think, to breathe, to simply be. Sometimes I wonder what became of the girl who, despite her unmedicated ADHD, was able to sit and read for hours at a time? What happened to the teenager who didn’t need to fiddle with her phone doing nothing in particular during literally every spare moment of her life? Earlier I mentioned the line for my coffee being longer than usual, and at first when that happened I felt a wave of frustration. I quietly wished they would hire more people so they could stop being short-staffed and instinctively reached for my phone to pass the time. But then, I stopped for a moment. I took a breath. I looked around and complimented the woman behind me for the pretty shade of blue she had in her braids. I spoke to the woman in front of me about her colorful, beaded friendship bracelets and asked her what they said before showing off my own. I made brief human connections instead of filling my head with noise, and it honestly felt good.
As a former teacher and current nanny, there is one phrase I often say to my students/charges: Practice Patience. I usually say this in response to them being particularly demanding about something they couldn’t have right at that moment, or when I have to dedicate my attention to another child, but now it’s also something I tell myself. Patience is a practice. Training your brain to wait for things is a skill, like a muscle you have to work out so that it doesn’t atrophy. In the era of using ChatGPT to spit out our emails for us in the blink of an eye (and at the cost of several gallons of water), I think it’s more important than ever to remind ourselves how to stop and think and feel and be. I don’t want to tithe my attention to corporate overlords who are willing to let the world burn if it means turning a profit. I want to spend more time writing, more time reading, more time just sitting and checking in on myself and the people I care about.
Even something as simple as sitting down to write this feels like a small act of rebellion. A moment I’ve claimed for my own, words from my mind rather than a computer’s algorithm. They may not be the most stunning or profound words, but they are mine all the same.
And I’m not giving them up just yet.
May 7, 2026
11:11 PM
Humanity Isn't A Virus
Anyone who tells you it is is trying to sell you something.
I tend not to be overly concerned with labeling my political beliefs in a particular way, especially in a world where publicly identifying as a Leftist online will get you everything from death threats and accusations of eating babies to absurd purity tests about which books by dead Russian men you have or haven't read.
But I do know that above all things I believe that a better world is possible and worth fighting for.
I remember when Covid-19 first hit and people around the world were under lockdown protocols. It became fairly common for people to share photos of streets empty of cars and people, but full of various wildlife who felt free to wander more freely without the noise and bustle of these usually populated areas.
And while I thought the images of the animals reclaiming the land in some sense were really interesting, I also recall a fairly common refrain I heard at the time that never really sat right with me:
"Humanity is the real virus."
So, here's my dirty little secret, just for you: I love humanity.
I love humans. I think we are an incredible, resilient species that has done incredible things in the past and is capable of doing many more great things in the future. And if that makes me a hopeless idealist or a "Bad Leftist™, then I am remarkably ok with that.
I am not merely fighting against something in my political ethic, I am fighting for a better world, which I would not bother doing if I didn't believe that one were possible. There are three pieces of media that run on a constant loop in my brain that sum up this ethos for me.
The first is this clip from the show Doctor Who:
The second is this iconic quote from Samwise Gamgee in LOTR:
And the last is this song from musical Newsies, particularly the last chorus:
And what the hell, here's a bonus clip from Everything, Everywhere, All At Once:
All these clips have something in common, something that resonates with me. Hope is not foolish, love is not wasteful, and humans are not some fundamentally wicked species the way I was taught growing up under the crushing influence of American Evangelicalism. Of course some humans are selfish and cruel. They pollute the earth, they hurt others, they plunder and rape and kill.
But that is not representative of all humanity any more than a rotten fruit is representative of the entire tree. In my life personally, for every awful thing that I've experienced from another human, I have experienced a thousand more incredible things. Kindness from strangers, sacrifices given with nothing expected in return, communities coming together. Even in the wake of the horrors that have been Trump's second term, I've seen goodness bloom from tragedy and people taking care of each other. People taking the risk or caring for others because the reward is greater than they could have ever imagined. That is the world and the people I fight for.
A better world is possible and it is worth fighting for. There are those who'd like to chalk their selfish choices up to "human nature" to free themselves from the burden of taking responsibility for their choices or experiencing the consequences of them. Truth be told I think it's actually harder to cut off your humanity than to embrace it. People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and all their vampiric ilk like to peddle hopelessness and despair to make things easier for themselves. To still be able to look at themselves in the mirror every day.
But I for one, am not buying.
