A lady I work with died. Just up and died, 48 years old, after a stint in the hospital to have a procedure done. Details are scant. She was a sweet woman, great to work with, and now she is dead. Not because of anything she did, any risk she took or bad decision she made, but because of the unfortunate convergence of some random circumstances. She leaves a husband and a couple of children,…
I’m getting married. You hear me? Married. MARRIED! I’m not sure I ever really believed I’d do such a thing. Once upon a time I was in high school when marriage was entirely abstract and I had dreams about Husbands and Children but in reality I knew I had to go to college and do some other shit first so it was a nice thought but nothing too pressing. And then some boys told me…
“I was good at blogging and then sucked at blogging before you were even born!” This is an actual insult that I am preparing to spit at some youngstuff should I ever need to. Seriously, people, when did this get so hard? I started two other posts tonight but then hit walls with both where I just realized, “Nope! I don’t have the gumption necessary to hit publish on either topic!” And it’s not like…
There are digital natives and there are the digimudgeons. The digimudgeons are already over the internet. They were clicking and dragging Geocities sites before most people even had dial-up in their own homes. They joined Facebook when it was a college-only site. The signed up for Twitter in 2007 before their bosses and families were on there. They miss Television Without Pity and Google Reader. And they are pretty sure the social web is destroying…
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…
I spent a lot of time this year working on a project that more or less fizzled out when I realized it was not going to make it. It was one of those projects that took over everything in my head, one where I thought, “Yeah, this is the one. This is going to change everything.” And then it’s not the one and it doesn’t change everything, and that’s okay. It stings a little to…
On a Saturday morning in the middle of October, you will sit on your porch and let your coffee warm itself in the sun. Your child will be nearby, toddling around in a shirt and a diaper, peeking through the shrubs to watch the traffic — constant, hurried, loud. The cat will be somewhere around you, eating spider webs and green things, relishing his momentary freedom. You’ll be planning your day, trying to plot out…
My mind is this great humming butter churn of a thing, moving unformed chunks of ideas around slowly and with great struggle. I have nothing to write about. It is driving me fucking bonkers. I have been sitting here staring at this screen, trying to make it happen, trying to remember something, anything, worth sharing and I have nothing. Everything is extremely mundane. I can’t just write about my kid all the time, cool as…
If 2009 was a book, I might have shut it with a scowl on my face. Too long, I’d have thought. With really unsympathetic characters. Mostly it’s the protagonist I would have hated. She’s moody and fickle and needy yet aloof and often makes really bad decisions. She has forgotten how to love and be loved. She lets men treat her like garbage. She’s so ambitious that she’s never really grateful for anything when she…
I am on the balcony, laptop pulsing heat onto my uncovered legs, nose stuffy from a summer stress cold, red wine (Malbec) in a Graceland mug on the window ledge behind me, three citronella candles and a mosquito coil flickering around me, yet I see the mosquitoes in silhouette against my screen, darting here and there and up and down and, occasionally, settling on a patch of skin still enough to penetrate and make me…
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