A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
According to an essay I once read, the U.S. electorate tends to select a president because he’s perceived as having some crucial quality that makes up for something his predecessor lacked. So, for example, we have Joe Biden now because he seemed eager to unify the nation after the divisive Trump era. And we had […]
Did you know I’ve written like a million theater reviews? Back when I lived in Chicago, that was a side gig of mine. Most of my bylines appeared in the Chicago Reader, to which I contributed pieces of performing arts journalism on a weekly basis from 2005 to 2016. Then I moved to New York. […]
On the day before I was supposed to fly home to Arkansas with my husband, Frank, to spend Christmas with my family, I tested positive for Covid-19. Consequently, we had to cancel that trip as well as another one scheduled for the following week. The plan was to fly from Arkansas to Puerto Rico, where […]
On the front of the holiday card my husband, Frank, and I sent out this year there are five photos meant to represent our 2021. Here’s what the images depict: us in Boston Common ‘cause we moved to the Boston area over the summer Frank in his doctoral robes before his graduation ceremony after completing […]
Shouldn’t Michelangelo’s David be circumcised? After all, the biblical king depicted in the statue was pretty famously Jewish—a hero of the faith, in fact, ranking up there with Moses and whoever invented bagels. Yet Michelangelo sculpted a Gentile foreskin for his David. It’s almost as though we can’t trust 16th-century European Christians to represent those […]
The zip code in my hometown of Springdale, Arkansas, is 72764. Not long ago, one of my sisters gave me a T-shirt with those numbers spelled out on the front. I assume she was trying to help prevent me from forgetting where I came from. When you move away from somewhere, forgetting where you came […]
I’ve started taking a vitamin B12 supplement. My doctor recommended it because I’m a vegetarian. Evidently, your body gets the vitamin, which helps make red blood cells and supports nervous system function (according to the Nature Made label), from animal products. So if you don’t eat those, you’re at risk, says WebMD, of growing weak […]
I had trouble telling time when I was a kid. The whole short-hand/long-hand, numbers-in-a-circle system struck me as prohibitively complicated. I knew you were supposed to glance at your wristwatch or a wall clock and instantly recognize that it was 3:47 or whatever, but it always took me a few too many ticks of the […]
Because I’m a writer, people sometimes assume I’ll like word games. Which makes no sense to me. Do you spend your leisure time human resourcing or whatever it is you do to earn a living? Thanks, but I get plenty of frustration and feelings of inadequacy from words during the day—I don’t need more in […]
Here’s something the Belgrade-born poet Charles Simic wrote in the 1990s about when he was a young immigrant in Chicago in the 1950s: Here I am on the midnight el riding to work or coming back after a long day. It’s winter. It’s bitter cold. Every time the door opens, we shiver, our teeth […]
Indirect Objects 