A butterfly trapped in a spider’s web

One of my co-workers died the night before Thanksgiving. That would have been sad enough. But what pushes this news into the tragic is that she wasn't some wizened old librarian. She wasn't someone who had been lucky enough to accumulate many decades. She wasn't someone who was at the end of a good, long…

Seizing the day…but having to give it back

I should in London right now. Really. I'm not speaking whimsically, but factually. Which is worse by far. Knowing that right now I should be standing in the middle of my favorite city on earth is KILLING me. A few weeks ago, the photographer Ben Morse announced that he was going to be opening a photo exhibition featuring his…

Aspirations, interrupted

WordPress has this handy little feature, the Stats page, where you can monitor pretty much any imaginable statistic about your blog. How many times it's been viewed, how many visitors you've had...and how many days it's been since your last post. And right now, that particular stat is glaring accusatorially up at me. Nineteen. Nineteen days since…

Starting at square one

I'm not the sort to remember quotes from the books I read, but every so often, one will strike a chord and it'll stick with me for years. One such passage comes from my literary idol, Stephen King*, in his autobiography-slash-how-to manual On Writing. I can't remember it word-for-word (and am gonna have to look it up now), but he basically says that…

The difference two years makes

Philadelphia is a city with a bit of a reputation: gritty, hard-scrabble, rough around the edges. Its residents are plain-spoken with low tolerance for bullshit. Its nickname, the "City of Brother Love", is used with heavy sarcasm by anyone who lives within the city's media market, because we all know that if there isn't bad news, there's no news. Philadelphians throw snowballs…