blog Archives - Boss Over Shoulder

The moon at daytime

The moon at daytime is a strange phenomenon when you think about it. But we see it because it’s there.

When I can’t make sense of present thoughts, I return to rewrites. On August 29, 2025, I wasn’t normally as capricious. I crave familiarity most of the time, and on other days, I reject it. But on this day, peace was not an afterthought. I did not dwell too long on daily preoccupations, like composing a text message or my route back home. I smiled at strangers. I availed myself to move on and stay put. My cup was full, but I did not spill my contents. I took a seat, drew a sigh, and sat down. Traffic on the interstate was steady like the breath. Beyond the highway and rolling hills, I stared into Pixar clouds against the backdrop of the azure sky. The air felt right, just like out west.

The moment was a gift. But I fumbled with two feeble arms receiving it.

Watching the daymoon float back as I drove toward its direction, dodging the same potholes I’ve memorized, I thought, couldn’t I imbue this elusive encounter rather than compare and contrast? Every song that played on my commute back home sounded splendid, so what was the catch? Everything felt aligned but illusory. The day’s fleeting minuscule qualities give credence for rejoicing in a rather rare occurrence, but what gives? Am I waiting for a moment’s passing to wistfully stare into what was? Did I bolt in an attempt to elude an impending disappointment because what goes up… must come down?

One has to be here to have this. So, land here. Gently.

I pulled into the driveway, entered the house, and sat down in my son’s room. Marbles, train tracks, cars, and books were strewn throughout. But I did not see a mess. I saw color.

when summer motions for autumn

As summer motions for autumn, I adopt patience into my practice. The seasons don’t turn overnight; they ease into the next. My dilatory response to recent activity has rendered me a curious desire and bold attempt to sit with things. I don’t enjoy things as they are; I wait for the next best thing I fool myself into believing. Right now, my son has plagued the silence per usual but this time by plugging in two Alexas in the same room, side x side, and telling both of them to count to 500. As Alexa counts, I draw up my thoughts.

I am disconnected from the world of fiction wondering if I’m finally closing the flap of my own book. Drawing up characters, building dialogue, and structuring plots have been few and far between. Is this something writers grow out of like like a pair of Wrangler denim or a teenage love? Dribs and drabs here and there, but I’ve been primarily carving time out for journaling. I hold all this; it has to go somewhere. Might as well land on a page or two.

Tellingly, motherhood makes you malleable. It jacks you up if not in the best way, in the way you never saw possible. I thank my progeny for these deeply lived, heart-stopping, -twisting, and -warming experiences. If you’re jacked up, you’re likely mutable, nostalgic, and spiteful, grieving an archaic version of yourself that you lost touch with as though they have become someone you now envy. That debatably funny free spirit who unapologetically shared life through social platforms now belies this neurotic perplexed soul who squanders minutes on an overthought grocery list and thinks pulling weeds from the rock garden is the hottest pastime.

During this paradigm shift with AI doing our jobs for us, the more writing I want done. I take its illusory emergence as some sort of fad, but its disruptive force is here and staying for better or for worse. As a last-ditch effort, I’ve applied myself to newer disciplines and punctuated on current ones. But it’s important for me to acknowledge that what one does is only a fraction of what or who they are.

Maybe it’s for the best, maybe it’s not for anything.

Teaching back-to-back classes, burning the candle at both ends, I’ve been writing guided meditations that sound like affectations as cues roll off the tongue. I’ll put students to sleep on a good day. Other days, some will walk out as I try not to take any of this seriously. My self-absorption puts me in check as I’m too careful of any spiritual bypassing. Another sweaty sports bra, another downward dog or spiral. It doesn’t wash for you? That’s cool; I have my sights set on humbling experiences nowadays.

There is something that is working, though. I’m learning to laugh things off when the day upends. The other day during a back-and-forth bicker, my son told me, “I’m angry, too,” before I dwarfed in size and my heart swelled. I softened and kissed him on the forehead. We are layered with calcified sheets and devastated by all this social-political information that wonder has been sucked up dry.

Our ego, the residue.

As I wear and take off these well-worn hats as a mother, teacher, and storyteller, there lies distress in being performative and having answers to things like, “How are you?” I’ll turn to the misguided child in tow and say, don’t follow me, but continue to clutch his hand. Most days I feel like I’m giving bad yogic advice while watching my empty words land flat on the bare feet before me. Most days, I prepare to be misunderstood and forgotten yet continue to ask myself, “How is everyone affording therapy?”

Exteriorization

This Monday afternoon feels a lot like a Sunday evening. The streets are damp from rainfall. The rain’s slick attempt to assert itself without becoming a full tropical depression threw off my plans. Representing an inner state, clouds arrive and leave, and the asphalt is fragranced with petrichor. We are several days into rainy weather. I forgot how the sun looks suspended in the lofty azure. I took the dog out for a walk at 2:00 p.m., and the streets looked as though it were a quarter before seven. It is now 4:00 p.m., but it looks like 1 p.m. Just like the weather, I am confused. It has outdone itself in attempting to be everything. Recent changes distress me, and it will be only weeks until I recoil to familiarity.

Could you make yourself useful?

Lately, dense clouds that eventually disperse greet me on weekend mornings. They are neither portentious in color nor productive of any rainfall. If you stay, could you make yourself useful? I thought. They loiter, confabulating near my parked vehicle.

Typically, I enjoy the rain and the thought of it. I support the idea of precipitation and how the sky needs to release. I support everything related to it: thunder, dry lightning, puddled gutters, raindrops on window panes, the sound, wet bangs. But I could also reposition.

We are of space.

You feel stuck, unable to escape this body, but you get out of bed anyway. You are riddled with the same preoccupations, continue to do someone else’s job, and somehow get through the day to spill into the evening. You wonder if something will fall onto your lap as you are busy doing something else.

It’s been a dread dragging these feelings, sulking, paralyzed by overfelt emotions, reeling thoughts, and identities.

This evening, I read a book. I was exposed to words that weren’t my own, and was hit by a creative compulsion. I thought about these rainy days. I thought about integration. Then I delighted in feeling at all.

Are we not what happens to us?

Today, I feel distracted but aware. Stagnant and paralyzed by either thoughts or their absence. I suppose I am trying too hard to make things work, to make myself useful and good. I had a soul-enriching conversation the other day. I left the room elated, ready for any shadows lurking around the next corner. I felt proud. I hardly feel like that anymore. The default lately is listlessness. My willingness disappears before it even falls into the periphery. I asked someone the other day if we mistake melancholy for contentment. I knew they weren’t the same, but the somber, this suspension, seems not uncommon. I wake up to the emotion, faint in its appearance but apparent in its imposition, as it looks at me straight in the eye as though I must nurse it all day. I sweat the day’s efforts so I can marinate and soak up the dregs. The week wears me well. I reify the week’s emotional residue by emoting what this is I am experiencing, before I can allow myself to leave my desk.

Write anything. Write shit.

The day’s highlight: my son’s deliberate arrangement.

Write about the impermanence of worldly pleasures and pain. Write about new buildings, deforestation, and lavish getaways. Write about isolation. Write about squeezing yourself into a space that you don’t quite fit in. And how you oscillate, deciding how to perform, that you fold into yourself anyway.

I stare into boxes where I am shelved, but I don’t stare long. I nod at assumptions, without agreeing to them. I save the small talk and prepare for misunderstandings. I hear the familiar dial tone when we disconnect, and I still hear it when I hang up.

Through this evolution, we emulate ideas and identities, and become ourselves anyway. We wonder if we would be confronting the unconscious mind if we were to leave what isn’t serving us. We ask ourselves whether we are only allowing the good and not the whole in this lived experience. We shuffle through work and passions and misplace our values.

I am divided between seeking growth with caveats and authenticity and peace. Then I forget why I began in the first place. I remember where to find the exit door, yet my paralysis keeps me directionless.

We try to become and embody as much and as many as humanely as possible, and are reduced to feeling empty, frayed, and corroded.

reorienting, moving through time and space

Reorienting from losing your balance; moving through time and space. Yeah, it feels like that. Those two are never too far apart.

The cerebellum, a component of the cerebral structure, receives unconscious signals from the body. The cerebral cortex deciphers these signals, noting where the body is in space, particularly during movement. Shifting and flowing through poses can help with balance and proprioception.

The cerebellum is responsible for muscle memory. It detects imbalances and coordinates body and eye movement. This helps us adapt to complex movement patterns, making them feel more second nature.

Anais Nin offers tender insights on the artist, the male counterpart and the new woman

Any work I read by Anais Nin, I prepare myself. The house must be quiet, and the chores must be done. I dim the lights. A prefatory setting must be made as though I’m setting out my finest cutlery for her impending visit. I know I’ll spend a great deal of time on the corner section of the sofa, and I’ll have already chewed my fingernails to the point of tenderness.

on writing

I read her essay, “The New Woman,” retreating to the deep reflection of her senses that lured me in the first place. She wrote about why one writes, liking it to breathing. She wrote profusely about how writing allowed her to experience life twice.

Writing can help one become increasingly aware. In moments when a writer feels bound, writing can liberate and create more room.

on artists

Anais Nin lived through other artists, and not just those who draw, compose music or design architecture. In her essay, she broadens this representation to those trapped in the house of the creative spirit — those with ideas and wanting to share them; those who seek to embody their internal world and who still bear their child-like fantasies into adulthood. She believed the creative quality that manifests in one makes an artist. She adds that psychologists often validate what poets have spoken about long ago, following a quote by Freud, “Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.” Nin aspired to both men and women creatives, particularly Henry Miller, whom she esteemed for the writer he was and the context in which he wrote. “I think I saw Miller very clearly,” she said.

on the new woman

On “The New Woman,” Nin envisions the novel woman blossoming today. This woman is courageous and adventurous and harmonizes with her strength but is quiet about it. She rations sharing her growth and success. This woman is no longer homebound through chores while wearing an apron. Rather, this woman encourages the man to be a partner with her, not a provider, and a sensitive man, at that, not threatened or compromised by this new woman.

Women have served as muses for a long time, and Nin cleaved onto this desire to be this inspiration to avoid having to write herself. For years, women were not asked to be pushed into the direction of a great writer, doctor or philosopher, but to marry and raise children. This new woman, however, faces her trauma and fear, falls in love hopelessly, taps into her sensuality and explores the confusing world of her own neurosis.

Anais Nin and her psyche

In her complex framework, Anais Nin finds poetry as essential as philosophy and psychology — which we lean into to recenter our misaligned selves. An artist rearranges herself to write fiction and dismantles herself to write her diaries, but the division is complementary and integrated. Her intuition sloshes along rationale without blending, like water and oil, and coexists when contained.

If you have read her diaries, you know she has delved into her vulnerabilities and explored her curiosities. Plunging into her psyche, one will come out soaked and disoriented from the depths of her perception. Nin does not highlight the disparity between women and men, femininity and masculinity. She blurs the lines, leading you to where the two converge. Where there is poetry, there is intellectuality. Where there is devastation, you will find creation.

In days when I’m confounded in my reverie, I look to Nin for having dreams and penchants. To assert myself. To have passion and communicate through the channel of emotion. To be moved by impulses and to stand rooted in personal conviction.

a good place to wait

The other day, I was at a good place to wait. I shuffled through my options and browsed a few job postings online. The job descriptions sounded inconceivable, leaving me tone-deaf. They were resoundingly plangent and eerily atmospheric like from a bad dream or an alt sci-fi world beyond me. They were lengthy and esoteric. Like, What does this even mean?

I’ve eaten the dust of trailblazers, envied the prosaic lives of my wealthy peers and known the ridicule of highbrow intellectuals. It must be common to feel like this: to live parasitically off others to satisfy, or at the least address, that pang of literary hunger, and to feel a tad dated with the slow, yet aggressive prevalence of artificial intelligence.

I am in this interim, but I was just here. I haven’t recognized whether to capitalize on what I know or deviate from a path I’ve been walking. Lately, it’s a lot of feeling stuck, waiting for any available opportunity to emote what this means. Opportunities these days mean a quiet empty house for a couple of hours, a good sleep and being aware of my thought patterns. If the opportunity presents itself as accessible, I’m lucky to string a few words together. A few years ago, I convinced myself to stop looking for meaning, but to start, to throw myself into the abysmal vacancy knowing I had nothing to lose.

I needed to humor myself.
I needed to write like them.
Move and shake like them.

a good place to wait

But I also needed to retire this idealistic view of where I needed to be and instead, identify the process.
I needed to write words on Post-its to keep words close to me at all. I found myself referring to dog-eared pages of books from seven years ago to recoil in emotion. My subjective attitude toward reality has always shackled me to this writer-life, far from a career that I found only exists in my daydreams or others.

I needed to continue feeling alive, despite feeling unwell. Recognize where the fount of my inexhaustible force, that zeal, is. Is it dormant in the continuity of thought and feeling? Found in the relentless quest of finding meaning? Is it deep in the crevice of struggle? Somewhere in between relationships or fact and fiction?

Lately, the world has been loud and infallible at cajoling me to move and live based on the grounds of logic. But as writers, we know that we are spurred by sensations and instincts, qualities we ration to keep our identities preserved, ourselves known or our sanity whole. It is our insanity keeping us alive, albeit brittle, and functional to seek greater depth in understanding and connection.

However, the disconnect, the chasm, never felt or looked so vast as it does now.

matter, tangible, undergoes cycles of life

If you’ve reflected all your life, then you’re no stranger to finding deep meaning in books, writing and other forms of expression. From simple sentences to an entire symphony, you connect, as though you long to or are already a part of the subject matter. It’s a quirk, a tendency, a hobby you instinctively do. By staring too long at spaces and things, parsing out the unseen, rationalizing with the arrival of feelings while trying to untangle the framework before you, you’re rewarded a profound understanding, a truth, a refreshing outlook or reality.

Seeing isn’t enough; you need to know and believe that there’s substance, a story, a trauma, beyond words and pictures either to disprove your insanity or to confirm theirs. It’s part of the creative process that bridges us on an entirely different plane. On this plane, you sense the cynics in the room, brush shoulders with the thinkers and oversleep with the dreamers.

Yet on this same plane, you worry about whether the job description looks too frumpy on you or if your 3.1 GPA brings out your eyes. You let everyone in line cut in front of you, despite a few decent friends telling you the water’s fine.

Let October have this one.

The fall equinox found the best seat in the house. It entered the room with a pumpkin spice loaf and a hint of seasonal depression. I never know whether to grieve or celebrate its advent, deluded by its novelty that I know will peter out like the sounds of cicadas in June.

So, instead, I stare into trees and give them personalities. Some are impulsive for change, eager to return to dormancy, to shake off some excess. Others stand deeply rooted, skeptical, and say, “It’s not time yet,” after having been burned before.

I get it. Trusting cool, quiet mornings is hard when the days scorch you.

On their terms, leaves curl up and fall to the ground to decompose, so the trees could return what was given to them. Some lean into change, others stand tall and tower over smaller vegetation, envious of their evergreen equals.

What the rest of autumn lacks, the anticipation —the transition — the subtle interval holds: yellow school buses roaming through neighborhoods, kids idling at bus stops poring over their sneakers, and cars imbuing interstates and off-ramps. Mornings feel a lot different; sunsets have shifted a few degrees over, and crowds seem subdued.

These observational qualities of the impending season will fall tragically to a collection of oversights if not noticed. But if you listen, there is an exchange to be had.

The foliage inchoately turns ochre, yet too quickly for us to see, as preoccupations like football season and fall recipes pool at the forefront of our minds. Porch lights flip on a quarter before five, and gutters end up littered with sienna-colored leaves by December. To some, the seasonal shift feels like an old friend leaving you at the bottom of the escalators at LAX. To others, it’s a vacant terminal on a Christmas Eve dawn, greeted by that same companion.

But back home, the climate belies this one. There, the sun overstays its welcome on melancholic days, and autumn feels more like early spring. I think of my aging parents. I think of their brittle bodies. Mom’s salt and pepper gray fringe and deep red lipstick. Sisters, nieces, nephews, and old friends are aging twice as fast in a single year. The longer I’m away from home, the shorter the time it seems I have with them. It’s hard to be away; it’s harder to go back. The closer I am to finding solace, the further I am from my roots. Homemade adobo hits differently after a four-hour flight in recycled air, on top of years of unappreciation for its flavor profile or the love put into it.

If conversations I never had growing up were swept under the rug, then so much is being said now. Or I’m a better listener. If I dial down the noise and stop fidgeting, I will learn that these conversations were always had… through food, at overstimulating loud family gatherings, and through Mom’s sacrifices.

Several seasons ago, we cared too much; we held standards and grudges. Compared toys and the shapes of our thought patterns and professions. In this season of life, we hold our last bit of savings, feeling like a sell-out, and prefer silence over sound. We wallow in guilt-ridden drives home, thinking a phone call should be made. We miss people, even the Mazda driver we were following who just turned off on the last exit – thankful for their consistent and smooth braking patterns that made the dreadful commute tolerable. Have a nice life, I say.

I worry I’m a patchy correspondent, knowing I’m hardly a friend, and I’m running low on excuses, always blaming the ephemeral seasons.

The trees tell me to shake it off. The seasons call this the interim. Friends say it will pass. My son tells me without telling me to be in the present. But as I straddle the line between here and there and fact and fiction, these reductive interpretations feel like a wool turtleneck worn in 80-degree weather.

I blink. My eyelids fold in like an accordion, and I see my son, hailing proudly from his corner chair with yogurt in his hair and a marred iPad to his left. He cracks a grin, likely plotting trouble while I sit back and decide if he should have this one today.

On days like this, I’m seven years old, waiting for Mom, hoping she doesn’t work double. Dad’s still in Burbank, idling in ungodly traffic on the 101. I’m home, but homesick, with leftovers in the microwave, and the only light turned on in the house is the second-floor hallway. Still, a single digit number, blowing in game cartridges, repositioning the metal antenna on the kitchen television, and unaware that 30 years later, the home I grew up in would be torched to the ground.

Several seasons later, I’m 37, a weeping willow. My son, a palm tree exploding with sunshine. A spoon strikes the dining room table, and I wake from a nostalgic stupor. I tuck my ruminations under the pillow next to my favorite Polly Pocket. Feeling immensely overwhelmed by a barrage of notifications, boggled by when I subscribed to them. I clear them all in one sweep without having looked at them.

What will find me, will. What won’t, won’t.

I wipe my son’s hands, wondering how I’ll get through today. While I recall peers my age who’ve bolted from the idea of parenthood, I shift my focus to this resplendent creature before me, who I hope will never know what is truly going on.

I stare at trees hoping to understand the world around me, life, and family. I study weather patterns maybe too closely than the average person, thinking something is in the air, but there isn’t. I stare at strangers conversing, wondering if we are all just having conversations with ourselves. Is life a series of back-and-forths? Having too much time on our hands? Too many thoughts on our minds? saying something only to take it back? Are we just here for a good time? Not for a long time? I stand still in this seasonal cycle to understand my son and his bouts of dysregulation.

Let him have his season, I say. Then let him enter the next one.

A writer is a sum of their experiences

I walked around the cul-de-sac tonight. The scent of impending rain reminded me of the first few drops after it had not rained for months. The warm smell of asphalt, tickling the nose, and wet grass — petrichor.

Nostalgia rocked me.

Those rainless months in California left an indelible impression, spawning my romanticism for rainfall. The sun hit differently there, how it baked your forearms, your shoulders. Now, you treasure weather patterns, the speed of traffic and empty intersections at dead hours. I still recall the quiet drive home, precise traffic lights and 2 a.m. drive-thru meals. The way the headlights hit the last stop sign before making my last turn to the house. How about those nights Dad locked me out, forcing me to crawl through the doggy door?

It’s funny now.

Heavy eyeliner, blond highlights and a bottle of Sailor Jerry’s, things we could afford.

I can talk about these things now.

Today, I wondered if my life needs to be more eventful to feed my creative endeavors. Daily drives to the city, idling in traffic, my son’s language flourishing — these things I know. Five yoga classes a week, burning the candles at both ends, another call to action, another copy, another condolence. Just feeling spectacularly average in this peripatetic life.

I played a Bright Eyes record today. Conor sang of pain like a big red rubber ball. Like receiving a call from Mom on the home’s landline, telling you she’s working double. Dad’s still stuck in Burbank and the only light turned on in the house is the second-floor hallway. Leftovers again. You are home, but you’re homesick. Afraid of school the next day, wondering how to blend in as a tomboy, standing in a straight line with the pretty girls. My hair, black, tied in a ponytail; theirs long, blond and flowy. It’s all subconscious now, these things never leave you. It hardly stings anymore, but you recall the sensation.

In ways, life is slowing down, and these erstwhile events and people are catching up. Yet why is life moving faster than it ever did? It’s so easy for me to leave people. It’s even easier to recoil.

I’m still here. Lately, I’m plagued by knowing I’m going days without you as you age. White hair in your dark locks, but your deep red lipstick stays, vibrant, familiar. Another year goes by after Mitchel’s death, but I mourn differently. I grieve like a mother, not like a sister.

How do you understand anything or see them through when you’re good at leaving? When you’re here not for a long time but a good time?

These lamentations have nowhere to go but bleed into spaces, vacant or occupied. Nothing to fix here. No void to fill, right, just space. Stories with really no punch line or allegorical theme. Just sharing. Living, and if you care enough, courageous enough, you’ll learn.