life, summarized

Sitting on the bus this morning, reading a book.

Looked up to see a woman and a man sitting next to one another, two rows before me.

The woman had a newspaper. The man had a magazine.

The woman was reading the obituaries.

The man was reading about how to invest more money for the future.

Thought it was amusing -- the advice on how to attain more wealth right up against a reminder of our mortality.

just tidying up

I'll be deleting the other blog soon (Don't Wake Me...)

It's gone from being the primary blog to being nothing more than a photo blog, but now that I've purchased a "pro" flickr account, there's really no need to keep Don't Wake Me... around.

To be clear, I'm deleting the other blog entirely. This one, Coffee and other Habits, will be where it's at from now on.

There are some posts from the old blog that I thought I should keep, be they funny, or opinionated, or an essay that took a lot of work (On Being Content, On Envying the Faithful, etc.) -- those posts have been moved to the tail end of this blog.

To see which ones I've copied over, go to the archive on the bottom-right. For organizational purposes, everything I've copied has been saved to November of 2006.

Never Ending Story

Several months ago, in a creative writing class, I started a short story. It's a story about a girl. She's young, alone, pregnant, and waiting for a train.

Her name is Amara.

Amara waits. She wants to leave her small Wyoming town as soon as possible. She's running from something or someone, but her train is late and so, she waits.

Amara meets a man. The man appears to be a transient; he is dirty, his clothes are worn, he sleeps on a bench a few rows away. Before long, Amara and the man are talking. She's nervous at first, but he has a fatherly way about him and eventually she opens up. She begins to tell him why she's leaving.

I think it's a decent enough story. Amara's character is well developed and the setting is there. The problem is, I don't know where this story is going. It hit a wall a long time ago and it's never quite made it past that wall.

Part of me wants to simply leave it. Move on. Let Amara sit in that train station for all of eternity so that I can think about something else. But I can't bring myself to do it. I need to bring some kind of conclusion to this story.

As it currently sits, the story is really about a conversation between two strangers. A conversation which, I hope, will enlighten both characters and help them to make a decision. What that decision will be, I don't know. It's up to them. But it is getting there, to that point that is difficult. That's where the story stagnates. That's where I'm stuck.

I don't want Amara to tell the man her entire life story. That's boring. I want at least some bit of mystery to it -- to why she's running away, with a swollen belly, from her home.

Any wisdom out there?

Oregon Weekend

Ah, the wineries, the Ocean, McMenamins Kennedy School and of course, the Tillamook Cheese Factory...

A perfect weekend and the pictures to prove it.

Happy birthday Kathryn!