A Catalyst in the Chain Reaction of Creativity

Jo said nothing after the beep that introduced the silence she was supposed to fill with her words. She felt the syllables spilling mutely from her lips, her tongue suddenly paralyzed and unable to give them life. Did she even know the man? The one she had watched for so many hours. The one who stood before her and hundreds of similarly eager faces, charting and graphing all his years of knowledge for them to copy onto blue-lined sheets of paper. Did she even know the man well enough to call his widow like this?

Her reverie was broken by the gentle click of the phone as her hand returned it to its cradle. Maybe she would be able to speak when she tried again tomorrow.

A Fighter

Mostly I have a hard time understanding how a light like that could be extinguished. In the end it was really only cancer that could have done it; something so cruel and tireless. Old age would have been too feeble a cause and she simply would have gone on living and laughing forever. My mother was a force to be reckoned with, and cancer was the only foe stupid enough to take her on.

I like to believe that she left it panting and broken in its corner of the ring.

Family Drama on Film

Each day I am the lucky recipient of an Awkward Family Photo that Faryl has deemed appropriate and/or particularly amusing. Recenty, she has started narrating the stories behind these Still Lives of Awesome. I felt today's was particularly entertaining:

Ok so the guy in the middle is the husband/father who is appalled by the man his wife is sleeping with on the side (which he totally knew about but didn't want to start a fight) [when he] jumps into the family photo. The daughter is saying "Dad, please don't make a big deal of this in public" and the wife is saying "Everyone put on a smile, this is our christmas card and yes I invited Julio into our picture, dear, he's a part of my life."

See why we're friends?

You'll get through it.

Look around you. There’s always someone who has it better, and always someone who has it worse. So when things are good, smile and savor every moment because it won’t always be this easy. And when things are tough, keep your chin up and your shoulders back because it won’t always be this hard.

The only thing that ever stays the same is that everything changes.

LA Architecture Examiner

I am it.



Let me know if there are any buildings you've seen around town that you'd like to know more about. I'm going to try to have a new article up 3 - 4 times a week.

Daunting? You bet!

A word.

Think of a word that inspires you. A word that makes you smile or square your shoulders or laugh. It’s a word. And – like any word – it can sometimes be used so often that it begins to lose the force it once had. Instead of knocking you flat with the power of it, it can just fade to an annoying nudge after a while of overuse. Eventually it’s reduced to a sound; a collection of letters pushed through lips that the heart never even touches. But then, something happens. You see something -- a person, a place, an action – and the word that used to skip over your ears so easily now becomes the only thing you can hear. It’s the only word that your mind can supply you with to explain what you’ve seen and what you’re feeling. That word suddenly gives the strongest voice to the beating of your heart, and you can feel it there again.

This is the how the word love touched my heart again.


People talk about love a lot. The word gets used a million times a day in a million different sentences spoken by a million different mouths. “I love you,” “I love this song,” “don’t you love this weather?” A million times a day. From family, from friends, and sometimes from total strangers, those four letters fall into the air and disappear like a fine wisp of smoke. And it’s not so much that I started to take the word for granted as it just started to fade. It became the smoke instead of the flame. Until I saw that something that ignited it again.

On Wednesday, I was sitting in the UCLA chemotherapy room where my mom has been going for treatments for a few years now. We always like to get a seat near the end of the building when we can, because the windows look out onto the playground of the elementary school across the street. My mom likes to watch the little kids on their recess and lunch breaks as they play tag and ride their tricycles. I like to watch the cars pass and judge the drivers who don’t know that I can see them through their sunroofs.

This day, however, I was enjoying the less cynical business of watching the kids roll around on all the bikes and wagons the school had for them. As each group of children pedaled and pushed, I laughed to myself at how – even at such a young age – you could already see how these kids were going to be as adults. There was the boy who abandoned his trike after one lap in favor of exploring in the bushes, the girl who giggled with her friends as they took turns pushing each other in their red wagon, and the group that was desperately trying to outrun the pursuing teacher.

But then there was the little blond boy who stood by himself, empty wagon at his side, waiting for someone to jump in. I saw his head turn as he watched each child that rode or ran by him. I could almost feel him hold his breath in anticipation that this would be the boy who asked for a ride or the girl who offered to steer. And I could see his tiny shoulders fall a little after everyone continued past him. For ten full minutes he stood at the ready, and for ten full minutes he stood alone.

My heart broke for him in those minutes, and I wanted so badly for someone to just see him. For someone to see the smile on his face and the way he held that wagon steady. He was there, and I wanted him to know that I saw him.

Eventually, another boy pedaled up to him and they chatted for a bit before he rode away and the little blond boy skipped off to play in the sandbox. But I could still see the boy by himself while the other kids ran past him, unaware. I’m sure he’s not alone and I’m sure he has friends in his class and parents who pick him up at 3:00p. But for that moment when I first saw him, he had no one. And it got me thinking about the people who start that way and never really get to see the end of it.

Whether they start out as shy kids who never manage to make those connections with others, or whether they become adults who can’t figure out how not to sever them, there are people in this world who are alone. By choice or not, they have no one and no one has them. The blond boy at the playground for a few minutes, the woman in the chemo chair behind my mom’s for a few hours, or my grandmother for a lifetime. These people were alone. When I thought about how awful it must be to live your life like that for even a second, I looked at my mom sleeping in that chair. I saw her IV piping toxicity into her veins to keep her living and her headphones piping Madame Butterfly into her ears to keep her alive, and one word filled my heart in that moment.

Love.

No matter what we have seen or what is to come, she loves me. She has cared for me and adored me every second of my life, and she never let me lose sight of that. I am loved. By at least one person on this planet, I am loved unconditionally and unendingly. But the beauty of my life is that she’s not the only person who loves me. My mother, my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents, my brother, my cousin, my closest friends, my distant friends. All of these people have a space in their hearts and in their lives that they allow me to occupy. How lucky am I? I’ve known plenty of people who can’t claim even a sliver of anyone’s heart as their own, but I have two fistfuls of people who truly love me. Two fistfuls of people who live in my heart, too.


I am loved, and I love. I wish the same for everyone, always.

Dear Dad,

Happy birthday.

It’s been roughly a year since I last spoke to you. I say “roughly” because, as you know, it was a gradual transition from the occasional e-mail or phone call to the infrequent text to just not responding to anything you sent me. And I stopped responding because I woke up one morning towards the end and realized that I hadn’t spoken with you or even thought about you in a long while, and I was okay with that.

See, the way I finally figured out how to get through to you was through silence. Because no matter what I ever had to say to you, you were only going to hear whatever you wanted to. I was always going to be the kid that your evil ex-wife turned against you, and nothing I could ever say or do was going to change that. I would fight with you and plead with you to understand that all I ever wanted from you was your love, but what I finally came to see after all the arguments was that you didn’t have any. For me or anyone else. Whatever path your life had taken to lead you to where you were had also ruined your ability to love other people. So in a way, you made it easy for me to fall out of your life completely. You’d been pushing me out for so long, in the end all I had to do was take one small step and I was out of it entirely. Now I’m no longer the daughter you lost in your bitter divorce, I’m no one.

Because of that, I find that I’m not nearly as tortured as I used to be. I’m still plenty jaded by you, but every day I lose a little bit of the wall you built for me. I give people chances, and they don’t always let me down. I give people my heart, and they take care of it. I give people my trust, and they don’t make me wonder what kind of mistake I’ve made in doing so. Every day that passes teaches me that you were a bad example of what normal people are: you’re not the standard, you’re the exception. After all these years, your grip on my life is starting to loosen.

There are still times that I think of you with a smile on my face, and those times are the hardest to get through. Whenever it rains, I sit in the big armchair by our picture window that looks out over the valley and I remember how you taught me to love thunder storms. I think about how you used to stand in the open doorway and listen to the deep thunder roll across the night air. I was always scared at first, but the huge grin on your face and your big arms around my tiny shoulders made it feel safer. You promised me that no matter how the sky lit up with lightning, no matter how angry those cracks of thunder got, the rain would always calm the night and still the noise. The distant rumblings as the clouds passed were like soothing apologies for the violence of the storm.

And something else reminded me of that side of you that I loved. A couple weeks ago, I bowled a 244. A 244!! I was hardly paying attention to the pins at all; I was just throwing the ball and laughing with my friend. Suddenly I noticed that I had somehow managed a strike in every frame except for a few! My very first thought was how excited you would have been to be there. I could see the smile on your face as you raised your arms in shared triumph: you would shout in that way that you do when you're excited about something, and maybe even do that silly victory dance for me. You would then walk calmly up to the counter and ask for a printout of the scoreboard from lane 20, because your daughter had just bowled a near-perfect game. And maybe, just maybe, you’d offer to buy me a Violet Crumble candy bar in celebration.

That day still creeps up on me sometimes, and I wish that I could have picked up my phone and told you about it. Bowling was always something that brought us together like the family we should have been. For ten or twenty frames, you were my dad and I was your kid; that was all we needed to know.

Now, though, my days are filled with other thoughts. Thoughts and events that I have no desire to share with the stranger you’ve become. The rational part of me, the part that will forever bear the slightest scar of you, knows that you are beyond reach and that my life is better without you in it. I’m happy and I’m thriving despite quite a lot of obstacles. You couldn’t ruin me the way you wanted to, and I’ve become someone who is loved and respected. I live my life with as much joy and passion as I can pack into it, and I share that with the people who support me.

I’m sad you’re not one of those people, but it doesn’t kill me like it used to. Every so often I cry for the life that we never could seem to work out between us, but now the pain has gone out of it. I’m just sad for you, daddy.

So on your birthday I just want to tell you this: I love you. I will always nurture the slightest flicker of hope that one day you’ll realize what that truly means, despite the years telling me that it will never happen. Should that day ever come for you, I hope it brings you at least a moment of peace in your lifetime.

Erin