Earlier in the year, my brother Jason Koons tagged me in a challenge to do 7 days of nature photography on Facebook. I always meant to share here, but never got around to it. So, several months late, here we go! Day 1 It was raining today, which put me in mind of this picture from Berry College in 2009. I love the way leaves look in the rain–each drop like a small galaxy. Day 2 When we were at the redwood forest in CA, my niece Megan pointed out these tiny, tiny mushrooms underneath the giants. Children...
Last week, I shared my mid-year report on my SMART Goals. As I reflected on what I thought this year would look like and what it has become, I started mentally compiling the things I’ve been learning. I know a lot of people (especially my age) are struggling with the darkness of this year. To us younglings, in many ways 2016 feels like the wider-scale darkest time in our lives. Hopefully these 24 confessions will bring hope, or at least an honest voice to the craziness. 24 Things I’ve Learned in 2016 There’s always something you can do. Last year, I...
Dear Body, Well, here we are again, on the night before everything starts to roll. You remember last time, yeah? We were seventeen and they’d taken the bloodwork and there was a crazy Mississippi storm that night. Remember how we curled over and cried a little and then wrote some poetry? Yeah, it sucked – the poetry, and the night. I’m not mad at you. I’m not breaking up with you. Partially because I can’t since, let’s be honest, you are me and I’m just personifying you to make sense of something that can’t be made sense of. (more…)
It’s National Diabetes Awareness Day! I cracked my knuckles, pulled out my stalker credentials and hunted up my little sister’s super secret old blog (which I will not link to, because she has access to younger!me blogs that I’d rather leave dead I respect her) for a guide to Type 1 Diabetes she wrote when she was 16. My sister was a weird 16 year old. I’ll let younger!her tell you the tale, originally written for our cousin, Brooke, and later shared with the wide world through LiveJournal. I’ve touched it up a little. There is a strange organizational flow...
This is a general update blog post, so it’s going to be a bit random and short. Yay? My friend Katherine came for a visit! We had many adventures, including but not limited to: Catching a train only because the staff held their car door open for us, performing period dances on the lawn at Chatsworth (Pemberley), exploring a plague village, and a bit of waltzing in the Assembly Rooms! (Katherine is my dance buddy and we took full advantage of this.) I have been editing like a mad person. This will probably result in some revision-themed posts soon. I...
While in Paris, Mom, Laura and I went to Musée d’Orsay to see the Impressionist paintings. It wasn’t until I saw the first Renoir that I remembered he and I share Rheumatoid Arthritis. When I saw that first painting (I can’t remember which it was), his words rang in my head as if I’d just read them: “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” (more…)
Today I was walking to the library, which is about five minutes from my townhouse, and I couldn’t make it. I had to stop and rest. After about ten steps from my townhouse, that autoimmune fatigue started settling over me like a boulder. The best way I can describe this sort of fatigue is that I can feel every heartbeat sluggish and heavy. I have to concentrate on taking deep breaths, and every one is like breathing through a straw. If I close my eyes, I become dizzy. The pressure on the back of my head makes a migraine buzz...
