This year has been longest I can recall in the decades since they started flying by. It has challenged me in ways I could not have predicted even twelve months ago, when I foolishly thought I’d mapped the full landscape of challenges. Much of what I’ve experienced I have not been able to share, partly [...]
The Personal Ones
I was supposed to be married now. I was supposed to live in some sort of expensive housing with my husband—that we owned outright, if you’d have asked my more optimistic and/or financially prudent forbears. In Chicago, most likely. Or the suburbs, for the schools. (I was supposed to get over my Thing about the [...]
Ten years ago next month—close enough to my birthday to call it the world’s worst present—I was diagnosed with an acute onset of Crohn’s disease. Thanks to great care, a little luck, and the world’s most amazing diet, I was able to avoid both surgery and aggressive, costly immunosuppressive therapy; still, my 11-day stay at the [...]
I began this series because I was having trouble beginning. (If that ain’t the sound of one hand clapping, I don’t know what is.) I thought that if I kept things small, I could keep things going—I could keep beginning, every day. And damned if it didn’t work, until about two-thirds of the way through, [...]
While I’ve been away from it quite a bit this past year, Los Angeles averages 186 days of sunshine per year. On the other hand, my second-favorite city, “the People’s Republic of Portland”, gets a measly 68 days of sunshine per year. This is as much of a reason to visit as any: never, ever do [...]
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Embracing the tiny, Day 19: Full of care
It doesn’t take all that long to tie up a packet of teas with a nice piece of string. But doing it 640 times takes a long, long time. Yet that is what the fine organizers of the conference I’m attending did. Along with a number of other small things I can’t disclose, lest I [...]
Do you remember what the world looked like when you were four years old? How tall everything was, and how mysterious? How grownups navigated these mysterious things with astonishing agility—driving cars, getting on and off buses at the right stops, counting change, ordering food. And how they seemed to just know, without anyone having to [...]
It is not, as it turns out, that hard to take a half-decent picture. What’s hard is taking 4,000 horrible pictures first. What’s hard is standing in the middle of the street like a stupid tourist hick taking two, three, seventeen horrible pictures while people stare at you with your doofus camera and your zero [...]
To earn its keep on my cooktop, a tea kettle must do three things: Be as easy to de-scale as it is to fill. This rules out those ridiculous kettles with only a spout. Be easy to pour. All of those “helpful” kettles whose handles wobble? OUT. Double-ditto for those ones that leverage gravity so [...]
On a rare Saturday off from my big, fat advertising job, I took the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan to meet my friend Claudia for a movie. The weather that was gorgeous and sunny and at least warm-ish when I got on at Park Slope was New-York-awful by the time I emerged from my stop [...]
