My name is Christina, and I’m a workaholic. I have this overwhelming sense of responsibility to my to-do list, and just about everything else seems to suffer because of it. It took two hours of enforced rock-sitting at the beach yesterday afternoon before I could mentally unplug enough to take the evening off. At the risk of stating the obvious, my work/life balance must be off if work things are demanding this much of my mental energy. The Rich Dad author was talking about personal finance, but “Pay yourself first” applies to most other parts of life. The challenge, of …

“Of all the people, you are one of the ones I wonder about.” We were walking down Mission Street after Moulin Rouge (not the absinthe-laced free-for-all some reviewers seemed to think it was but nevertheless a riot of sound and color nicely flavored with love and tragedy), when someone behind us called my name. Called it three times before I figured out the voice might be addressing me. It turned out to be one of those movie-moments that never happen to real people: time and distance fade to nothing, and someone from the past recognizes your present self. In this …

“Children are very good at pulling you into the moment, if you will let them.” I watched a mother I know play with her two year old son, trying to wear him out so he would sleep when she took him downstairs to his bedroom. He lay back on a huge, floppy stuffed lion, commanded “onetwothree,” then squirmed and giggled as his mother blew on his side, tickling him with her hair. Evidently, “onetwothree” was inadvertent education. His parents used it as a drumroll when playing games with him. “Get ready…” Now, the child says it back, onetwothree, make me …

“Here is the church, here is the steeple; Open the doors and see all the people!” While walking to my neighborhood BART station yesterday, I passed a church. I’d walked by it before, for months actually, without its church-ness being all that obvious. It sits on its own artificial hill, squatting over its parking lot. The building itself is a marvel of non-traditional architecture, with three parallel roof segments, and a front wall entirely of glass, revealing a spider’s web of steel support beams inside. It reminds me of those collapsible plastic spheres you see in toy stores these days. …

“Ignore Reality. There’s nothing you can do about it.” The other day I found myself thinking about things I wrote during my last significant period of creativity, pieces written when I was certain that I would be a writer and when I did not doubt that I had something to say. The stories are neatly packaged narratives, written with the simple belief in the clean orderliness of the world. Right is right, wrong is wrong. I wrote them when I knew everything. Now, 10 years later, it seems I know so very little. When I left my small high school …

I feel curiously blank today. Empty. Like if you were to pop open the top of my head, you would be able to see clearly the inside of the skin on the bottoms of my feet. All my inner parts are missing, and I am weightless with their absence. I am nothing but a hollow skin. The noise of the train rattling down the street bounces around inside my head, echoes in the spaces of my hollow self, reverberating most where my stomach used to be. The train is gone, over hill, around corner, and I can still hear it, …