Tag: learning

  • Life Is A Notebook

    I came across this idea the other day, and it stayed with me longer than I expected— the kind of thought that doesn’t just pass through, but settles in. Maybe it’s the way we hold onto moments—like scraps of paper, like old notebooks tucked away in drawers. Every now and then, something reminds you that…

  • Mariachi Me… Same Traje, Different Mileage

    Mariachi Me… Same Traje, Different Mileage

    Being a Mariachi isn’t just about the music. It’s about what you carry before you ever play a note. The traje—sharp, tailored, unmistakable—has a way of teaching you that.  At first, it feels like a costume. Something you put on to look the part. The shine, the stitching, the silver botonadura, the way it commands…

  • Little-Known Facts About Me

    If you look back long enough, you start to notice the strange little things that were always there. Not the big milestones. Not the obvious moments. The quieter details— the ones that didn’t make sense at the time, but somehow explain everything now. I don’t usually sit around listing facts about myself. Feels a little…

  • Like Buttered Toast With Jelly and Coffee In The Morning 

    Sometimes, in my early morning musing with my coffee, I get philosophical.  That sometimes makes me want to kick my own ass.  I mean, why am I complicating a beautiful quiet morning with deep thoughts? That guy in the mirror is still half asleep and wont listen anyway.  Funny how we wake up, sit down…

  • No Schedule, Just Sunlight and Shortcuts to Nowhere

    I grew up in the 70s and 80s, in a city that felt like it was still learning its own edges. Streets weren’t lined with development yet, and blank spaces—lots of dirt, weeds, and sun-baked patches of ground—were waiting for someone to claim them. We claimed them. We ran through them. We made trails, shortcuts,…

  • Scraped Knees and Torn Jeans

    There was a time when play was king—not the quiet, sit-down kind, but the loud, dusty, borderline-dangerous kind that required sunscreen you never used and rules you barely followed.  It was the kind of play that guaranteed you’d come home a different person than when you left… mostly because parts of you were now missing…

  • Throwing Words Into the Wind

    Let me tell you a story…something I learned about myself, and only fully recently acknowledged. This won’t be a confession of weakness, nor a tale of courage or inner strength. Those are just labels. And the truth is, labels are strangers to far more people like me than most realize. If anything, this story is…

  • The Longest Day – Sanitized, Signed In, and Socially Distanced

    I’ve had long days before. I mean, who hasn’t. Everyone has a horror story or two about work, some more drink worthy than others. A friend and I were recently comparing notes over coffee, as one does when caffeine doubles as a therapist. The conversation inevitably twisted itself around the question: who had the longest…

  • Out of the Dark to Find Me Again

    So last night, I had a realization. Not one of those cinematic, lightning-strikes-the-soul kind of realizations. No dramatic music, no sudden gasp into the void. More like… sitting there, minding my business, and boom—my brain quietly taps me on the shoulder like, “Hey… you good?” And apparently, I wasn’t. Or at least, my writing wasn’t.…

  • A Little Bit of Us in Everything

    I saw this quote today, and it resonated with me deeply:“We are writers, my love. We don’t cry. We bleed on paper.”I have no idea who wrote it, but it hit me anyway. As a creator—writer, musician, photographer, cook—it applies across the board. Our emotions are always on display through our work. Not always overtly,…

  • Kinder Chronicles, Room 3, 1974

    Teacher’s log, Kinder Day 31 I used to think I was in charge. That illusion lasted exactly four minutes on the first day of school—right up until Little Tommy licked a purple marker, declared it “grape,” and asked if we had any crackers to go with it. We did.We always had crackers. Kindergarten, in those…

  • Meandering Toward Sense

    I got distracted and lost my chain of thought. Which is fitting. I was thinking about paradoxes… and somehow got derailed by one. I was about to create a list about things that are paradoxical, ironically ironic, awkwardly unawkward. And then I lost the list. Somewhere between “Port of Entry” and “Why do we drive…

  • Between Me and Myself

    Sometimes the quietest conversations are the ones we have with ourselves.They come in fragments—moments of memory, glimpses of people we’ve loved, the echo of a voice we thought we’d lost. This is one of those conversations. It started with a dream, a few small visits from my mom, a song that kept coming back, and…

  • Freedom on Two Wheels

    Back in the day, a bicycle was freedom. It was far more than a way to get from here to there. We treated our wheels the same way our dads and big brothers treated theirs. Well… at least I did. I grew up watching my old man in the driveway on weekends, tinkering with his…

  • Why I Create…

    Sitting with myself this morning, coffee in hand, I asked, “Why do you create?” …and the reflection in the mug stared back, quiet, like it already knew the answer before I did. “Why do you create?” I asked again, slower this time, letting the words curl in the warmth of the coffee steam. And the…