Prague

Driving in Portland, I occasionally glimpse a steep, hill-side narrow street with tall buildings, and, as intriguing as it looks, I don’t turn down it because this way it can remain in my imagination a portal to similar streets I walked a decade ago in Prague. I look for strings of continuity to the person I was when I walked around Prague (we never had a car, nor needed one) and they are hard to find at first. The baby always strapped to my chest is now almost as tall as I am, and has three younger brothers. And though the odd Czech word or name of a subway stop will rise unbidden, it seems like it all belongs to a different lifetime. My first response to what it was to me to be in Prague (twelve years ago we went, next week, and ten years ago we came back,...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jun 25, 2008 | 7 comments

Playing Along

Jenny of Jenzai Studio and my real life bff tagged me with the six word memoir meme. Thus – Here are the rules: 1. Write the title to your own memoir using 6 words. 2. Post it on your blog. 3. Link to the person who tagged you. 4. Tag 5 more blogs. I won’t cheat and use the one I came up with in February. Instead, going off one of my favorite comments recently, here are my six words: Striving for Strenuous and Muscular Kindness And now I tag: 1) Raven 2) The Unreliable Narrator 3) The Almost Right Word 4) Nolan 5)...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jun 22, 2008 | 4 comments

The Other Half of Who I Am

Mother’s Day, it turns out, is relatively simple for me. A well-deserved nod to the noble sacrifice, the giving over of identity, the universality of being the bearer of life. Then Father’s Day comes. Raven has taken Xander to a birthday party this afternoon — the mother of the birthday boy apologized to me, “I’m sorry for scheduling this on Father’s Day!” and I was quick to reassure her that our family life does not rely on a calendar to tell us when to appreciate one another, that Father’s Day just seems like a good day to avoid family-style restaurants where you see dysfunctional extended families spending obligatory and uncomfortable time together eating overpriced food served by stressed out waiters, when people...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jun 16, 2008 | 3 comments

Psychology of Punctuation

Ellipses are the opposite of an exclamation point for me, a tentative trailing off… Right? Annoyance at myself to sound so adolescent girl insecure, asking for approval and validation, so unwilling to assert myself. I notice I am writing in my own private journals with too many of these trailings off, and suspect that it is psychologically indicative, the way it is when I get too carried away with parentheticals, completely unable to proceed in a linear fashion from one thought to another, instead having branched and nesting ideas. On the other hand, perhaps the punctuation just indicates a sloppy habit. I can re-write in short, snappy declaratives. I experiment with it here. The second week of parenting alone is making me a little crazy. It’s the...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jun 13, 2008 | 5 comments

Alienation is Too Easy

Truth time: I don’t like the blog entry I published yesterday. I slept badly wondering if I had gotten too far from my own belief in kindness, in looking for the best in everyone, which it turns out, isn’t for the just the moral in some Disney movie I’d let my kids watch, or something to pay lip-service to, while turning around and gossiping with friends in the corner. I see it as a spiritual challenge and conscious choice, a battle fought against the darkness and indifference of the universe. There are more unkind things than what I wrote on Amazon, of course, and actually, the internet abounds with unkindness and cattiness, but that’s one of those things that I find toxic about the internet, people not imagining that what they write could...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jun 5, 2008 | 9 comments