You know what I find simultaneously annoying and irresistible? The umpteen thousand or so articles out there on “life hacks.” See “50 Life Hacks to Simplify Your World,” “99 Life Hacks to Make Your Life Easier,” “40 Life Hacks That Will Change Your Life!” Yes, yes, and yes! All of the above! Who doesn’t like simplification, ease and change? Not me. And all of this actually came from a practical place. The first “hacks” out there seemed to be genuinely useful things – how to tell how fresh an egg is, how to use a post-it to clean the crap out of your keyboard. But recently I’ve seen hacks for how to get to know a person fast (!!), how to learn a foreign language, and how to feel confident (????). Is it true then, can anything be hacked? Is there a hack for writing a beautiful poem (um, is it called haiku?) or creating a piece of art?

January and February were big thinky months. Partially because I spent the vast majority of them holed up in a two bedroom condo with an excessively clingy dog. ‘Holed up, why?’ you might ask, say, if you live in Borneo or Iceland. Or maybe somewhere in the US where the collective bitching and moaning of everyone in the Mid-Atlantic cannot reach. Snow is the great, angry god of forcing you to stay home and get all pensive. A pensiveness that inevitably (if you are me) turns toward an intense paranoia of being snowed in as a very old woman, alone in the world and unable to walk to the grocery store for V-8 and pickles. I started looking at my dog with a fearful and knowing eye. Knowing because I was running film reels in my head of her munching down on my poor, lonely, dessicated, elderly corpse. Fearful because, well yeah.
Anywho, the point here being that being snowed in along sows the seeds of pensiveness about one’s respective step on the great, herky-jerky escalator of Life. Now move to the right, all you slow boats! And maybe the whole ennui is bolstered by just how long and bitter this winter has been. It’s the kind of winter that makes you yearn for a wood fireplace in every room. And a pot of soup on the stove. And bread in the oven. And your grandmother smiling in the kitchen, even though she’s been dead for a really long time now, so maybe your mom instead. And makes me yearn for a baby to rock and snuggle with in the evenings, and perhaps a set of strong arms to hold me.