“Did you hear about Michael Jackson?” my aunt Donna asked me. I mumbled, “Yeah,” because properly attaching my beautiful, blue bike to the bicycle rack on her car seemed more important than the death of a pop star. Michael Jackson was already dead, after all, but if I didn’t figure out these straps and plastic doohickeys, my dear sweet Bluebell might die too, underneath the wheels of an SUV not leaving enough following distance. (Three seconds, people! Remember that when you’re renewing your license.)

Little did I know that THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD EVER had just died!!!

Yes, not even Ronald Reagan’s passing garnered as much publicity and attention as the death of Michael Jackson, and it certainly didn’t spur a tribute concert at the Staples Center, complete with elephants. I just wrote a big long paragraph acknowledging all of his accomplishments as a way to fend off any nasty comments from his fans, but then I deleted it because I just don’t care. I know the guy was famous and [...]

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When email piles up in my inbox, it is usually because I am avoiding taking action. A message with an old timestamp is usually related to a task I don’t want to do or to a question I’m not sure how to answer. For me, a messy inbox signals procrastination, and the more I avoid email the more it piles up.

Lately, I have been working to clear my inbox every night. This doesn’t mean I’ve necessarily answered every message, but I have at least archived or sorted what has been sent to me. I have folders labeled “To do” and “Respond to.” This saves me time because I am no longer reading and re-reading and reading again the messages in my inbox and telling myself “I need to reply to that” and “Still haven’t replied to that” and “I really need to do that thing that person is asking about.” It’s less repetitive. My mind gets out of a recursive loop.

Clearing my inbox also makes me act on messages I’m avoiding, so I get more [...]

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A husky man with a little dog walks past my back porch every night at 7:15pm. Sometimes he is reading a book, other times he is playing a hand-held video game which I know is not called a Gameboy, but I want to call a Gameboy because I was born in 1980. Usually he is wearing a T-shirt, flip-flops and baggy gym shorts. Regardless of his outfit, every night at 7:15pm I burst into uncontrollable giggles, because it is very odd to have a strange man who is oblivious to my existence appear within 3 feet of me and then disappear as quickly as he came. I almost expect him to stroll through the sliding glass door, look up in a confused manner and mumble, “How’d I end up in this lady’s living room?” Then the cats would attack.

My new apartment has a back porch which faces the back of another row of apartments in the complex, divided by a stretch of grass which probably has a proper name defined in dictionaries, but I don’t [...]

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