You need to take productivity seriously if you want to get anywhere. Inspiration is 47% perspiration and 50% reading lifehacking blogs and 62% planning and 89% planning and that adds up to 100% awesome. Trust me, my mom was a math teacher. Follow those simple tips and you will make friends, succeed professionally, lose weight, feel confident, and stop crying yourself to sleep at night under the weight of a despair that sits squarely in the center of your chest like a cat-shaped stone gargoyle sucking your breath away.

I’ve taken to writing on notecards. I have one stack where every card lists one of my Big Things - things I’ve committed to writing or reading or doing for myself or someone else. They’re all in a stack so I can forget them. I have another stack made up of my to-do lists for the day. I made one for each day of the week. I write down what I should do for the day. At the end...

The kitchen at my work holds a trap: the coffeepot. You finish the coffee, you make more. This great rule means there’s always coffee available. But sometimes there’s exactly one cup of coffee left in the bottom of the pot and then I suddenly become much more conscious about the health effects of caffeine. Coffee late in the day, I sleep poorly at night. Too much caffeine and I get tense, start to drum my fingers on tabletops, tap my feet and bounce my knees even more often than usual. I become a one-man drum corps, minus drums and rhythm. Excess coffee dries me out too, and as I’ve aged my eyes have become canaries in coal mines when it comes to dehydration. They become dry and scratchy and then I think I might cry.

It’s not that dehydration makes me sad, it’s that dry eyes feel like it feels to be sad: scratchy-eyed as if I’ve just been crying heavily, and the thing I always do right...

My walk to work, following the straightest line, passes through a large park with two playgrounds. I trudge up the grassy hill as a small child runs from his mother, who calls “hey! you gotta tell me before you just take off!” He continues up the hill, his mother walks after him, alongside me now.
“How old’s your little boy?”
“Two!”
“My littlest daughter is about a year and a half,” I rush to mention my kids and concentrate on not sounding like I’m rushing. “She walks off like this too.”

My mother circled her children. “I watch them like hawks,” she would say. She meant “I watch them like a hawk” (but older now with my own children I appreciate the double meaning. And I remember now that we used to tie our terrier to a line in the back yard when we lived out in the country, a line that let him run the length of our long yard, and hawks would start to circle and my dad would go bring...

“You’re home early!” She’s at the table, reading the baby names book again.
“I got a phone call from that HR guy -“
“About the interview?” The chair creaks as she turns her body to face me.
“Yeah. I… he…”
“Oh no. But you said it went really well!”
“I thought it did. They went with someone else.”
“Something will come through.” I try not to notice that she puts her hand on her belly when she says this.
“Sure. Anyway. How’s little Bump today?”
She smiles now, “been kicking a lot.” I lean over and kiss her forehead, lean close to her belly.
“Hey Bump! Mama says you kicking a lot today!” The baby kicks. “I love that she kicks when I talk to her. Bump we gotta pick you a name.”
“I wrote some more on our list.”
“Cool. Can we talk about that after dinner?” I don’t want to argue about baby names right now.
“Okay.” She pushes off the table with one arm, stands up out of the chair. “Do you need a...

Elements of Style. Yep. Bird by Bird. Definitely. I came here to get that book. How to Write a Sentence. Hmm. I add it to the stack in my left arm. I flip the book over to read the back of the dust jacket. Holding the book open with my right arm I lean my left elbow on the library shelf to take some weight off. I scan the author bio. Sure, what the hell. Continuing down the shelves I add book after book. With each book I feel excited: insight, instruction, clarity… if I read this book I will finally be ready, be past the obstacles in my way, be able to write what and how I want to, and feel better about it. Their number and weight grows in my arm. How long will it take me to read all of these books? Do I have time for that? I swat at that fly of a thought with the next book I pick up. The doubt buzzes away, circles back around my ear, and it brought a friend. There are so many more...

Sun lit the sky pink and orange last night while I walked by the lake with my baby for the last time. Geese flew a V formation overhead. Hearing their honks, my daughter said “cack cack cack” because she thought they were ducks and she can’t say quack yet. A fish that looked about as long as my forearm jumped high out of the water and splashed back down. Bicyclists breezed past, joggers trudged. We heard the bounce of the ball hitting the concrete at the basketball court, “baw baw” she said. A ball is one of her favorite toys right now and she always says it twice. From the playground floated that happy hubhub of kids playing, a mix of laughing and upbeat shouting. “Baw baw! Baw baw!” she pointed. Once again I imagined asking the young guys at the court to stop their game and let my kid hold their basketball. Once again I turned away from the court hoping she’d forget about it soon after...

Fluid sloshes and ferments in my skull. It leaks from my eyes when I read, from my ears when I listen, from my mouth when I talk. Lately my skull-liquid drains faster than it refill and ripen. Not the prettiest metaphor, I admit. Much in my life demands my attention now. Maybe not ‘now,’ really. A hive of demands swarm around my head on a regular basis, but lately I feel particularly tapped out. Lately the demands buzzing by my face have been particularly large and insistent, and I’m at a lull after a large project, a valley in the waves of activity. Lower reserves and higher demands make this a good time to economize, to spend my brainjuice wisely. My impulse is the opposite, to dribble it here and there, too few drops to really nourish anything substantial, but poured out frequently enough to leave my head hollow and echoey.

There must be steps I could take to help my head refill and...

I ignored the twinge in my lower back as I lifted the black suitcase and set it in the open trunk of the car. I added the gray backpack, the green laundry bag, two brown paper bags - food and electronics - and the kid-sized navy blue backpack with the teddy bear face on it. I shuffled the luggage around so the trunk would close then paused. Everything was in place. I took a deep breath. My back ached a little. I dug my phone out of my pocket and made a note to see the chiropractor for my back and to go to urgent care the next day for my earache. I looked back down at the jumbled trunkful of bags. I took another deep breath. No one was crying. No one was tugging at my pantleg demanding to be picked up. No one was climbing on me. No one shouted. No one asked me for anything. Round white clouds like cottonballs floated slowly in a sky full of blue. I took another deep breath and walked back...

Crammed on these shelves sits too much of myself. My bookshelves, I mean, and better said it would be too much of my selves. My book collection serves as a museum of who I have been before. There are the books I loved when I was a younger and less laudable person. There are the books I loved when I was a younger and more laudable person. There are the books I read because I looked up to people who read them. Those split into important subdivisions: books that enhanced my respect for the people who read them, and books that decreased that respect. And of course it matters a great deal, for curatorial purposes, how much I now respect those people and books (or how little).

Unread books lurk in bulk as well, marks of aspiration. Family: books I bought because I wanted to be the kind of person who read those books. Genus: books I never read. Species: aspiration remains unfulfilled...

“Streetwise! Get your Streetwise!” She sells her papers here every morning.
“Hey, I’ll take one.” I get one each time a new one comes out.
“Oh hey how you been honey?” She hands me the paper, takes my dollar.
“I been okay, sick of the heat, you know. How you doing?”
“Can’t complain, it’s a beautiful day.” She smiles.
“Well, I gotta get a move on, you have a good one.”
“You too!” She turns to the people walking by, “Streetwise! Get your Streetwise newspaper here!”
I walk into the building where I work, sign in, hit the elevator up button. I’ve been here on an internship for about six weeks. Every time I buy a paper I tell myself I will read her nametag and find out her name. I’m pretty nearsighted and she wears the tag right by her breasts so I don’t want to seem creepy. Plus she’s told me her name once before and I can’t remember it. Kathy? Katie? Carol? Kay? Something like that. I...