Before I left for New York City, I had a long conversation with my mom about various career changes going on in my life. “I don’t know,” I told her. “In five or six months, I may just be working part time for X, and not even try to find another job. I could work on my writing.”

It was such a stereotypical pipe-dream-of-everyone’s thing to say that I almost didn’t say it, and regretted the words almost immediately after they came out of my mouth. You never talk about writing more. You just do it, or you don’t. Future plans voiced aloud (especially about writing and travel) are just a more discreet variety of excuse, apology.

But thankfully my mother, like my former therapist, does not take any of my bullshit. “If you’re going to do that,” she responded, “you’d have to be really, really passionate about it. Are you that passionate? I’m not sure. You don’t have that bug-eyed look.”

It was the perfect response for two reasons:

1. It irked me, and

2. I realized, in a way, she was right. I’m passionate about writing, but I’m not passionate about getting published.

And why aren’t I passionate about getting published? Because it will probably involve a lot of work that will be fruitless. Like college essay writing, I’ll chuck a couple of hours into something and will likely have nothing to show for it. It will require a certain relentless confidence and, simultaneously, a lack of pride, like asking boys on dates, over and over and over, without wondering “Christ, why can’t one of them just ask me out, for a change?” I want the boy to be the one finding me, preferably while I’m doing something beautiful (weaving, climbing trees) alone in a dewy meadow somewhere. Basically, because I don’t think it would be easy. Aha!

A friend and I have been corresponding about pursuing our various creative pursuits, and it was determined that we’d both reached that special place of uncertainty and self-doubt: we needed prompts.

He sent me three pictures of items in his apartment to inspire a short story, and I sent him three of mine to inspire some radio.

We use one more than the other in this place.

Lamp pull.

A Christmas present.

See larger sizes here, and his prompts for me here. Now go forth and prosper. Your creative effort is due November 9th.

For the longest time, I just assumed that nobody could read digital clocks. They’re such jumpy bastards, unreliable in their clarity. Obviously, here was a situation in which analog was overwhelmingly superior.

“What a strange invention,” I would think to myself in high school mornings, munching on cornflakes and staring at our microwave. The bright red numbers wavered in their black desert like a magical oasis: a promise of time, unrealized, intangible. Was it 6:55? 8:55? 3:58? It became a fruitless game of chicken. I would stare at that clock until I felt nauseated and had to look away.

I like to think that my assumption of universal trouble with digital displays was completely and logically founded. I’d had the usual eye checkups as a kid, and every time I was applauded out of the doctor’s office. “She’s got some eagle eyes, that one,” the nurse would tell my mother. This was no surprise to anyone: whenever my mom lost the back of an earring she’d send me into her bedroom to find it; I read text backwards, upside down, reflected in mirrors, in the dark. It’s practically a party trick: joke books have never really worked for me, I’ll read the hidden punchline before I get to the set-up. Obviously, if I couldn’t read digital clocks, no one could.

So it came as some surprise to me when in the laundromat a couple years ago, a friend asked me how much time was left in my dryer, and to my response of a merry scoff they tilted their head questioningly. “Uh, dude,” I said, “I can’t read that freaking thing from here.”

They looked up and across the machines. “You have twenty-eight minutes left. Seriously? You can’t read that?”

I stared. The numbers wavered, glowed, became fuzzy. And thus, at the age of twenty-three, I learned that the reality I’d always assumed to be accurate was, in fact, flawed.

And this has revolutionized my world: I can’t stop thinking about it. Every time we wait for the approaching bus, every time I hit snooze on the alarm, every time I watch the laundry spinning in its elaborate cotton ballet instead of those dizzying neon numbers, I wonder: how many other things are like this? And how does one write, constantly doubting where the universal ends and the personal begins?

I have spent the past few years fruitlessly searching boxes and drawers at home for a poem that I wrote in the ninth grade. It was the result of an “ode” assignment; already disillusioned with all the romance bullshit I’d been cranking out since the seventh grade, I’d decided to write my ode to a deeper, more stable love. I wrote my ode to a car.

The car in question was an old bulky thing (I have since identified it as a Pontiac GTO, likely 1967), the color of mint toothpaste, which happened to be parked in front of the ugliest house on the block. I was infatuated with this car from the beginning — perhaps mere days after we moved into that house in St. Louis Park — and I stared at it longingly from the smeared windowpanes of the school bus, fantasizing of the day I turned sixteen. Years later I’d crane my neck as I drove by in my mother’s car, plotting.

“Some day,” I thought at that car, “you are going to be mine.”