When I set out to learn about my mother's bridge club, the Jewish octogenarians behind the matching outfits and accessories, I never expected to fall in love with them. This is the story of the ladies, their game, their gen, and the ragged path that led me back to my mother.A profile of a writer in today’s NYT really affected me. I mean first I had to get over the fact, as I do every day, that the NYT didn’t profile me when my book(s) came out, but I digress. Yi Miris has written a novel called Tokyo Ueno Station. She made a suicide attempt at 14 and was coaxed off a ledge by a janitor who brought her home and gave her, along with his wife, a meal. “Her depression persisted, and she tried several more times to kill herself.” Those sentences are so easy breezy, as if she sneezed several more times at the opera or tried on a pair of black pearl earrings a few more times before settling on the emerald cut chandeliers. She kept writing, she fell in with some thespians and had a romantic liason with a much older director. At 26 her first novel was published and won a prize for debut novelists. “Since then,” she says, “I have written every day. It’s just how I live. Life itself is writing.” Sometime I do think writing is the opposite of suicide.
Life itself it writing. Discuss.
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Betsy Lerner 
just finding you in my inbox is sunny enough day for me
One of my favorite lines from John Irving: “You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows.”
I think writing helps stop many of us from jumping out that damn window.
“Life itself it writing. Discuss.”
What’s to discuss? Res ipsa loquitur.
Okay, I’ll speak a little more for it. If I’m not writing, I’m getting depressed. If I’m getting depressed, I stop and think and I think, “I’m not writing, I should write.” Then I write and presto, away goes the depressed.
Writing is how I save my life. It’s how I make my matter, the fact that I am a coalescence of energy shocked and organized into being, matter. It’s how I give meaning to my life and to the world around me. That’s likely a reflection of the role language plays for we humans — it’s how we make meaning out of the otherwise meaninglessness into which we are cast.
Writing is how I survive life for sure, even when I run out of things to say in my tiny two hour window of writing before work and waste my own fucking time.