A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
A few years ago, an editor of the pop-culture site Consequence of Sound asked me to participate in a then-monthly, now-defunct feature where writers contributed personal essays inspired by the tracks of a classic rock album. It was a different album each month, and a different writer was assigned to each track. I wrote a […]
As of this month, I have been keeping a journal for 31 years. Not the same journal, obviously. During those three decades I’ve filled up 14 notebooks, and I’m about halfway through no. 15. This comes out to a little more than two notebooks per year since I got going in October 1988, when I […]
I didn’t start putting styling products in my hair until the summer after my freshman year of college. The next summer I came out of the closet. Make of that what you will. Despite my hair’s gel-free condition in high school, a classmate we’ll call Elizabeth (not her real name) did turn to me one […]
When I visited the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul with my husband, Frank, the Rick Steves guidebook we were using kept encouraging us to interact with merchants and artisans in the enormous market’s “outer fringe,” beyond the tourist- and trinket-filled central zones. Because I am a weak-willed follower who will do anything a book tells me […]
When I was 5, my mother and I planted a vegetable garden in our backyard. Then I broke my arm, leaving her to do most of the weeding. When she tells this story, she acts like I let her down. She’s joking (I think), but it’s also true that the tale’s intermingling of gardening and […]
My first out-of-town travel-writing assignment after getting hired by Frommer’s in 2016 involved a tour of New Zealand. Talk about setting the bar high. And speaking of heights, bungee jumping was supposed to be part of the trip. Though I considered going over the brink, I ultimately decided not to, owing to some deficit of […]
I threw up at a Tastee-Freez when I was 6 or so. My family would sometimes go there after Sunday night church. That’s right: On Sundays, there were services in the morning and in the evening, and we went to both, presumably because the internet hadn’t been invented yet and we were hard up for […]
At this point, having CDs is like Christianity: so passé it’s embarrassing. Nevertheless, I’ve hung onto a bunch of my CDs. For that matter, I still practice Christianity. Though I stream music like everybody else nowadays, I appreciate a CD’s tidy square packaging, the little booklet of song lyrics that’s often included, and the finite […]
My father taught me to shave by handing me a Norelco. That was the extent of his instruction. I rubbed the buzzing thing over my face until the fuzz was gone, and thus was I initiated into a timeless rite of manhood. I don’t know how electric razors work, but it feels like they yank […]
For most of my adulthood, my weight has been an unwavering 158 pounds. Recently, the number has begun to creep higher, presumably due to my slowing metabolism and not any changes to my diet or fitness routine. After all, altering those things never had an impact before. Lord knows I tried. In my mid-twenties, I […]
Indirect Objects 