some good talk.

What do you want to talk about tonight? There are days I get hungry for good talk. I don't want to talk about my day, what I ate, what I did, where I went. I don't want to talk about the weather and public transportation and paying rent and making money and I don't want to ask or answer the question, How are you?

You know what I mean when I say good talk. The stuff that makes up living: belief, love, hope, suffering, compassion, service, purpose, death, loss, religion, government, good, evil, and on it goes.

I would be in a happy world if I could ask every stranger I met if they believed in a god and why or why not. I suppose survival dictates that we can't bare our souls to everyone we meet, and I'm certainly not the soul-baring type. But I would like to know people.

Back in October, I joined Twitter because, for years, I've been following the journal Creative Nonfiction. They have a running contest for tweets - Tiny Truths, as they're called. I would get the newsletters and see the winning tweets and think, Man, how cool. I wish that was me.

So I joined and I've been tweeting every so often and a lot of my tweets have been picked as winners in this contest. But the big prize is that a few are selected for each quarterly journal. And it is May and Creative Nonfiction: Issue #44 is out in the world now, and one of my tweets is in it.

I'm a Sugar fan because, really, how can you not be. This column of hers has been circulating around the internet over the past few days, something she wrote around this time one year ago. She was writing to graduates who felt uncertain and scared of the future. She writes of publishing her first novel and how she never thought it would happen, but also, somehow, she always knew it would happen. That's how I feel. As I say, these are small potatoes. But there is something very magical about saying to yourself, I will do this thing, and then going out and doing it.

If you had told me four years ago, when I was a very insecure and confused graduate, that I would see something I wrote printed on the pages of a journal that I worshiped and adored - I wouldn't have believed you. But somehow, I always knew it would happen.

Say you will do it and then do it. Choose and act and let that be your life.