A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
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. […]
Instead of a collar, my dog, Lucy, wears a bra when she goes out for walks. I don’t consider this piece of equipment a harness because I think of a harness as having two straps—one around the chest and another around the torso with the front legs in between. For me, securing such a contraption […]
“You go through this stuff like water,” my husband, Frank, said the other day when we were stocking up on La Croix. In addition to being unwittingly humorous (seeing as how La Croix is water, how else am I supposed to go through it?), the statement is true: I do drink a lot of carbonated water. […]
During the pandemic, I’ve traded half-hearted gym sessions for half-hearted runs. Every other morning, unless I can think of a good excuse, I go for a jog starting from my apartment building on W. 125th St., then either following the Hudson River north toward the George Washington Bridge (don’t worry—I never get that far) or […]
Sometimes I think it’s a shame I didn’t live in an era before modern orthodontics. I have naturally occurring straight teeth—no medical intervention went into the making of my smile—and I figure that back in pre-braces times this feature would have made me stand out, godlike, among the snaggletoothed masses. Of course, those days were […]
I remember next to nothing about visiting George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, in Virginia when I was 9 years old. But I do remember the conversation my mother and I had with some Japanese tourists while we were lined up out front. I don’t know how the chat got started, though if I had to […]
August 6 was this blog’s first birthday. In the post that started off these discursive ramblings about the objects I live among, I tried out the Virgilian lottery—a form of soothsaying where you open Virgil’s works at random and whatever passage you land on is supposed to tell your fortune. So I flipped open my […]
According to our lease, my husband, my dog, and I live in a two-bedroom apartment. But the place clearly started out as a one-bedroom situation, until someone walled off part of the living room to create a small, closetless second bedroom, leaving only a tiny open area next to the kitchen to pass for a […]
Lately, I’ve been listening to a language-learning podcast to work on my Spanish. My husband, Frank, is a Spanish speaker, and when he’s angry, he really does rant in the mother tongue, à la Ricky Ricardo. I’d like to know what he’s saying about me. Besides, Frank has made an effort over the years to […]
Indirect Objects 