Aspiring writers have been through a certain phase more than we ought to admit. This phase is a phase of frustration and loss of inspiration. You ask yourself “how do I become a writer?” or “what do I write?”. I believe that inside everybody is a story and everybody has the potential to tell it.…

When I complained to my mother about fearing like I wanted love too much for it to actually come willingly to me, I invoked the saying, “A watched pot never boils,” to prove my point. She replied, “I bought a see-through teapot so I can watch it boil every day. Sometimes, it is just about…

Hi all. Long time, no rumble. Life has been hectic and all-encompassing. I’m okay not writing sometimes because I’m too busy living. But let’s be real. At the end of the day, nothing makes sense if I can’t write. In 2015 I made it a goal to focus on performance. To improve as a performer,…

You know how I get through heartbreak? Easier each time and each time more brutal. Because after every heartbreak I end up investing in myself with a healthy dose of forced optimism. But not only myself, also in my closest, and most valuable relationships. After I broke up with my first real long-term boyfriend (we…

I’ve finally figured out what will help me slow down a smidgen with everything: work, ambition, volunteering, skill-building, catching-up with friends (an endless task, not to sound like a douche monkey). I’m getting a puppy. The puppy that I so secretly added into one of my older posts but never correctly identified as MINE AND…

I had planned on blogging all through my European adventure before I left. I wanted to regale you with the trip too-many-times-taken by eager and lost 20-somethings and put a fresh, Arinaish spin on it. Lesson # 427: I want lots of things that probably, in the grand scheme of everything that I want to…

Ever since I’ve come back from Europe, I constantly get questions about Europe. I expected this, but it’s still challenging to keep both myself and my friends amused, especially because my most important stories are.. well.. the same every time I tell them. I get bored telling the same thing over and over again, even…

Following your heart is a brave act that shouldn’t be brave. Should be as simple as swallowing the tight knot of fear in your throat and cleansing your palate of nerves. We shouldn’t have buds in our tongues. It’d be easier to not taste the bile of expected regret rising up your neck, scaling its…

Your hand traverses from the curve of my waist to my hips, like a performance car hugging a mountain trail, ends up at the peak, stills. I am turned away. My eyes are closed. I can feel you listening to my breath as the air conditioner hums in the other room. I am asleep and…

Lisbon has taken a while to get to. It took a flight delay, a technical failure, and 2 subways to get here. It also took a lot of my nerves with it, considering that what the hell am I doing? The world has serial killers in it! AND PEOPLE. This is what Lisbon looks like…

Escalate your patience until it is steadily humming past an old age home full of open-mouth chewers. Chewing cud like cows on a field with nothing to do all day, and you aren’t pulling your knuckle hair out like a chimp. Elevate your passion until it is buzzing slightly beyond your fingertips, like a carrot…

There are only so many tender ways of saying, “Don’t forget about me.” Five involve The Breakfast Club soundtrack. Two involve perfume. One involves a sharp pair of keys, a delicate paint job, and blasting Carrie Underwood. And then, you just have to bleed into their mouths while they sleep, so when they look for…

Drop down, heavy. Weigh your responsibilities like grocery bags in each hand as the other numbs. After a day of lifting your chin, rolling your shoulders back, walking steady, holding your smile until your makeup creases in your skin, all you want is some silence; respite care for the buzz in your brain.

Mental clarity is a far-off shore. I remember being confused in high school, but not about my passions. The things I was passionate about were clear as the sunshine.  I looked up, opened my arms, fell on the grass and felt warm thanks to my devotion to writing, to music, to friendship. Right now, the…

You are a monsoon that everyone sees on the horizon, And underestimates. “How bad can a little bit of water be?” The natives are running. My heart is running, burrowing like a hedgehog into my spleen. My feet stay planted on the ground. Personal, Poetry/Prose I want to live inside your voice, Inside the guitar…

Oh, November. You were a trying sort of month, in that NaNoWriMo hell sort of way. Remember when I wrote that post about how, by now, December 1st, I will have 50,000 awfully positioned words and a fancy online badge made up of a variety of pixels to validate my effort? Yeah… that didn’t really…

Today is one of those days when so many things get thrown at you that instead of buckling — because hey, you need a job — you listen to really old music and try to prioritize, while failing at it miserably. I spoke to a lot of people, and all I can think of is…

Life in the city has been tiring. Work is 1.5 hours away and that means that I am snoozing on the subway so often that my coffee often perks me up in unexpected ways (ie. by staining the clothes I wear on my lower extremities). But, in my petulant need to come back to reading…

Why wear flip-flops when you can wear your sanity on your sleeve, and throw a throw over a shoulder? Saunter in like a perfumed old heiress in furs. You are worth all the dead animals. You are worth the guilty conscience. The omens silence themselves while reading literature and looking into history, like a witch…

Nobody told me that you breed compassion from humility. I thought it was born from other people’s imaginary insight into the troubles of your poor, difficult life. Nobody told me that your grow love from love and labour. I thought it was bred from gifts and baubles, and nice dinners that you couldn’t quite afford.…

Sunset Buttercups by Joni N Women are well-accustomed to walking on eggshells, bombshells treading heavy on glass-shards; nails driven deep into their heels; to the marrow, splintering. Straps don’t cushion the blow, and neither do the chandeliers hanging from your lobes. They drag down both hemispheres into this sad, open vulnerable watermelon, going bad on…

Mint, lime, coconut. Squeeze, time, collapse. Island, mime, book. Drink, sleep, slap.

Let it forever be known that the night before my 23rd birthday, I ordered a Macbook Pro from my mother’s credit card, had my own credit card defrauded, and watched The Bachelor starring Jesse Palmer with my 4-month-old, incredibly itchy and unbearably cute little pup (although I would have much preferred to cuddle up to…

Up until this Monday, the 10th of June, 2013, I’ve written, read, and discussed a lot of stories about Generation Y. Reading through these articles, I’ve grandly nodded my head at the sweeping generalizations, whether accusatory or pitying, about my age group. Of course you need more than a university education to succeed in the…

Things I should be doing now: packing. Things I shouldn’t be doing now: trying to prove the worth of feminism in 140 characters or less, catching up on my YouTube, exploring options for Summerlicious.TO, thinking about how I’m not sure whether I’ll every be able to afford even Summerlicious.TO ever again, having mini anxiety attacks,…

People stop noticing and doing these things when they get older, but that moment when a kid grips your hand really tight when they see something new and overwhelming and scarily exciting, that moment when a pup lays their head wherever and however closer they can to your body, their lip tugging on the material…

There’s a post I read on ThoughtCatalog that I haven’t been able to get out of my head for -literally- the past few days. It’s by Ryan O’Connell: the big pumba of TC. The one paragraph that I had noticed has resonated with my very current life in severe and striking new ways: “It’s possible…

Nobody except Lois Lane and Spiderman kiss in the rain, no matter how hard Taylor Swift peddles her romantic fantastical bullshit (even if it is catchy and makes me want to live as a white man in 1920′s Louisiana) (a lá Louis CK). Life is not about fantasy. It is realism. It is ugly and…