ACCORDING TO ZAC

It’s not uncommon for there to be lulls in conversation during my sessions with my therapist. Sometimes they feel like a bit of a standoff to see who will fill the void first; those are the days that I’m not feeling as introspective, or our previous conversation hasn’t sparked much for me to sort through. But other times the quiet helps me make some sense of what I’m feeling (or reel from being confronted with something I don’t know how to make sense of) and then decide what to jump into next. This week there was one of these pauses, and I’ll admit that I didn’t feel like I was really working through much. But I wanted to wait out the break to make the doc determine the direction we would go. It’s a tricky game of chicken because he will either ask me, “What are you thinking about?”, and that doesn’t always work on a day I don’t have much bouncing around my brain, or he’ll ask me a question that cuts right through me. It feels like there’s absolutely no in-between. This week he leaned ...

Stanely Tucci is a national treasure, and I won’t hear otherwise. The Devil Wears Prada was probably the first time he came on my radar, but his role in Easy A sealed the deal for me. Caesar Flickerman in The Hunger Games ? The icing on top. I just want to be friends with them in real life. Stan (we’re on a first name basis, obviously) stars in Supernova alongside Colin Firth, and together they tore my heart out, ripped it up, put it back together, tore it apart some more, but then mostly mended it and gave it back to me. That’s pretty much exactly how I like my books and films because it helps me keep in touch with my own humanity. It’s a harrowing process, but one I think is really important. “Do I still have feelings? Am I still a person?” I’ll muse. And then a piece of media will knock me on my ass. “So I guess that’s a yes.” The premise of this film is that Stan and Colin are lovers, one of whom is living with early onset dementia. And that’s pretty much it; that’s the plot. Yo...

It’s so interesting how memories will surface after being tucked away so long, and how they can almost knock you over. That happened to me last week while I was reading a book called Warlight (3 out of 5 stars, FYI). There was a scene about packing a trunk and an impending separation between parent and child that was probably incredibly typical of WWII-era Britain. But what it jogged in my brain was packing for my mission almost 10 years ago. In the three months between opening my mission call and leaving for the MTC, everything that we bought for my time away got piled onto the bed in our guest bedroom. Periodically my mom and I would go in there and count out how many shirts I had, check the list again to see what else I might need, etc. Then the day before we flew out, we stacked it all on the living room floor, alongside the two big suitcases I would be packing my life in for the next two years. As I rushed around that day, packing somehow got away from me. And when I say “someho...

I didn't know when I first started my feature writing class how much I would come to enjoy learning from my professor, Bill Schmidt. He's a former New York Times bureau chief that retired to Tucson to teach and kick back a bit. He told good stories, managed to make a loosened tie look really classy, and used his expertise to make me a better thinker and writer. One of the lasting gifts he gave me, however, was turning me on to The Atlantic , a really interesting news magazine that I otherwise hadn't heard about. Since I took Bill's class back in 2014, The Atlantic  has been a place where I have learned a lot  about the world, the way people think, race and class issues, critique (mostly of TV and movies, but also of social norms and trends), and a host of other things. This year when they chose to go to a paywall model (subscribe to good journalism to keep it alive, folks!) I immediately purchased a subscription and have been thrilled to have unlimited access onlin...