I scheduled surgery for Election Day partly to be funny (“wake me up when it’s over, haw haw”) but mostly because it was the earliest they could see me to remove the 7-centimeter endometrioma that had invaded my one remaining ovary. The surgery went well (as far as I know) and the doctor was able to preserve the ovary, which is very good news. He reported back to Richard (while I was still conked out)…
• Perspective, if you look at it the right way. • A three-inch white hair that grows out of your temple overnight. Overnight. • Ideas, so many ideas, that will burn in the back of your head for days, weeks, months, years, waiting for you to feed the dog and clear your desk and load the last dish and answer the last email and sing the last bedtime song and fold the last towel until you…
We bought bikes. It was at my insistence, a desperate middle-aged Hail Mary to try to find some form of exercise that I don’t hate so that I don’t end up in a Little Rascal at Walmart before I’m forty. “Let’s get bikes for Christmas!” I told my husband back in October, when we were settling on the notion of not buying Christmas gifts for one another. He agreed, as he is wonderful and actually…
My budding mid-life crisis is apparently that I want to do all the things. • write and illustrate children’s books • run a cute farm, like one where there’s a corn maze and people come to pick out pumpkins • be a travel writer/photographer • move to a small town and run a photography business and unite the town with spirit-boosting photographs of their lives • become a letterpress printer • freelance design part time, have…
The thing for ladies to do these days is put shocks of pastel in their hair. You see it everywhere, across race and class lines. Lilacs and pinks and teals and robin egg blues. A sea of bobbing cotton candy, as far as the eye can see. Not me. It reminds me too much of my high school, where girls would bleach their hair with peroxide and use Kool-Aid paste to color it a rusty…
The past few weeks I’ve not been able to keep up with the greys. I was plucking them for a good long while but now they are everywhere. Witchy, thick, kinked-up ones and frail, wispy ones you barely notice unless the light hits them the right way. I can’t keep ripping them out. The ratio won’t allow it anymore. I know it’s a normal part of aging but it’s unsettling, this change. How do they…
I’ll be 33 in two weeks. To mark this occasion, I have Googled famous people who died at 33 and re-learned that Chris Farley and John Belushi were both 33 at the moment of their untimely demises. Not to mention good ol’ Eva Braun, who is the postergal for bad taste in men. Ahhhh, what a refreshing dose of reality on the eve of my continued slog toward middle age. I am going to go…
I get annoyed at how often I balk at the trappings of adulthood. Bills show up, expecting that I pony up for all the amazing and comfortable things I have access to on a daily basis and I feel personally affronted. BUY WHYYY DO I HAVE TO PAYYY FOR STUFFFF! my brain says, seizing into the fetal position. Paralysis sets in when I have to make important decisions. Hell, even not very important decisions, like…
It’s 10 p.m. and I’m sitting at a blue plastic table, sipping a canned Coke. I’m surrounded by banks of whirring silver washing machines, and I’ve figured out that by sitting at this table, I can feel the blasts of cold air from the AC. It’s a nice counter to the heat radiating off all these dryers. This is the Wash Tub Coin Laundry, open 25 hours, according to a sign on the side of…
I just saw the comment “datz ma last day of skool” on the Facebooks. I had to physically get up and walk away before I replied, “Oh yeah? What fucking horrible school would that be?” Old, old, old.
You must be logged in to post a comment.