At 8:30am, my phone pinged. There are six of us on a text chain about local mountain lions, road closures, and which house we’re walking to for afternoon beers. This morning, there was an accident on the Pacific Coast Highway somewhere between Malibu and Santa Monica delaying commuters by a whopping two hours. I texted an old coworker with the details, knowing she would be caught in the traffic.

I like structure. This is probably an understatement. I love overarching themes, identifying and creating patterns. I look for narratives. I want to know how each piece fits into an arc, has meaning and significance. I use a lot of anaphora in my poetry. ​ I thought a vacation would be the end of my exhaustion. I went to Alaska very tired, and I came back less tired.

but jet lag has a way of making even comfortable beds in comfortable neighborhoods seem foreign. There should be a term for this sort of chain reaction of literary progeny: you read a book that forces you to read a book that forces you to read a book, the textual equivalent of a wild night out. but I just want to fade the instinct a little bit, to train myself for more durable content.

and of course, my mother is upset at me for not having sent her any yet to begin the ritual of unpacking, to return to my old habits and objects and find all of them a little richer from the time spent away. My to-do list is very long right now, and I’ll be spending the rest of this Sunday in my inbox. But I am so much happier than I was this time last week — my legs more tired and my head less fogged.

In 2006, Senator Ted Stevens infamously described the internet as a “series of tubes,” for which he was ridiculed, but his statement has aged well as a metaphor if not a literal description: a visual reminder of the wormholes we’re teleporting through to reach one another, the digital bridges and tunnels — the infrastructure we arrived by.

I know conferences can be expensive, and everyone has to judge for themselves what “affordable” means. But I’ve seen a lot of people lately say that they simply can’t do WWDC anymore because it’s “way too expensive” and I wanted to address that. Now, of course, depending

“An airport after security and before boarding is, at least to me, the last place where every verb is only in the future tense.” “The veil feels thin between who I have settled into being and all the other people I could have been.” “Maybe it is possible to want the things you have”