A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
A calendar is a hopeful purchase, what with all the empty spaces full of possibilities and the tacit assumption that the buyer will survive through December. I usually select a wall calendar among whatever’s on the clearance rack in January. I would prefer for the monthly images to be dog-related, but in the past I’ve […]
I was born in August 1979, so all but the first four months of my first decade on earth were spent in the 1980s. Consequently, I have nostalgic feelings for hairspray. The same goes for the Smurfs and anti-Soviet sentiment. I recall two notable encounters with the latter attitude during my prepubescent years. When I […]
This year’s Christmas tree came with a ribbon tied to one of the branches identifying the tree as a “North Carolina Fraser fir.” So I named it Treena Simone in honor of North Carolinian Nina Simone. Granted, the High Priestess of Soul wasn’t the holly-jolly type of entertainer we typically associate with the December holidays. […]
My husband, Frank, and I let our dog, Lucy, sleep on the bed with us at night. She prefers to stay on top of the covers, curling up in one of the valleys created in the topography of the bedspread by the humans lying underneath. I like the warm weight of her cuddling except when […]
At the Southern Baptist megachurch my family attended when I was growing up, you were supposed to bring your own Bible to services, which were held Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday evenings—and that doesn’t even count Sunday school, choir practice, youth group, and periodic revival meetings. Not to mention the daily Bible classes and […]
When my parents dropped me off at college, my mom gave me a laundry basket. Taped to the bottom were instructions, written in my mother’s perfect penmanship, for properly washing and drying clothes—tasks I had never attempted up to that point. I no longer have the cheat sheet, but, as I recall, its author was […]
This presidential campaign season is the sixth one I’ve lived through since reaching voting age. So far, I have chosen the winning candidate only twice—Barack Obama in 2008 and again in 2012. My selections in 2000 and 2016 (Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, respectively) won the most votes, but for some reason that doesn’t ensure […]
For a while there in the Aughts, I’m pretty sure there was an FCC regulation that required an Intervention rerun to be broadcast at all times of day and night. Today, there seems to be a similar rule governing the scheduling of 90 Day Fiancé. Intervention was a reliable presence on the airwaves but certainly not a […]
When I was a kid, the big trend in stickers was scratch-and-sniff technology—yet another miracle of the modern age we now take for granted. My circa 1985 sticker album—a colorful spiral notebook with 16 cardboard pages on which blank spaces for stickers are surrounded by jolly cartoon animals, foods, hearts, stars, and other illustrations—devotes an […]
The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum once argued that Breaking Bad is a TV show you crave and dread at the same time. As it happens, I feel a similar way about The New Yorker. It contains the best magazine writing there is, but the articles are long and a new issue comes out approximately every 11 minutes. […]
