Cat Pollock Writes

Tonight seemed like a good night to start cleaning up my bedroom. My older sister and brother-in-law are coming into town next week, and they may not be staying with us, but they are visitors, and it looks like a tornado localized to my bedroom swept through and made a mess of everything. The problem is that I ran into a stack of old notebooks from my college days, and putting those away led me to the drawers where most of my old writing projects now reside. Getting into those drawers meant going through them, looking through old and unfinished stories I might want to finish someday. And going through those old stories made me think of my old journals, which led me to the journal I kept from my trip to Kenya five months ago. That journal's been sitting on a high shelf, untouched for almost as long as I've been home. There have been a few moments here and there in the intervening months where I've thought about pulling it down, dusting it off, reading it, and maybe th

It was about five years ago that a little movie called Valentine’s Day came out. Cheesy-ish rom-com about what happens on Valentine’s Day for a more than a few people whose lives are somehow vaguely connected, with an all-star cast that kind of made it better than the storyline would have suggested. I saw it somewhere near the end of my time in Australia – month two of my journey on The World Race – with the guys on my team. It was a spur of the moment decision, because we were at a mall, somehow found our way through the maze to the movie theater, and thought a movie would be a good idea. Because I’d been sick on Valentine’s Day (the day, not the movie), which was when the rest of the team had gone out for dinner to mark the day, seeing that movie kind of turned into making up for not getting to join my teammates. I kind of wish I could say I remember what goes on over the course of the movie, but I don’t remember. One of the many plotlines running through the movie (and the o