I’m currently on my second passport. I got my first one in 2004 in order to travel to Italy with my family. I still remember the photo inside because I looked wild-eyed and slightly deranged—sort of like Jack Nicholson in The Shining when he uses an ax to chop his way through that bathroom door and […]
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Cards from My Grandma
Among the treasures I unearthed while packing and unpacking my belongings for my recent move from New York City to Boston: a lapel pin bearing the likeness of Mary Tyler Moore; a handwritten love poem addressed to me by a college classmate who contends that I am “silly on the phone” before praising my “manly […]
Boxes
Listen, I have about a million things I need to do before I move to Boston in—oh my Lord—four days, so let’s make this snappy, okay? You should know how these posts go by now. I’ll give you a rough outline and you can fill in the rest in your imagination. Let’s see . . […]
Packing Tape
My parents divorced when I was an adult. After they divided their assets, my mom sold the house in order to move someplace not filled with painful memories. One night, I was helping her pack up her scrapbooking room. Okay, well, my then-boyfriend/now-husband, Frank, was helping her pack up her scrapbooking room. I was mostly […]
125th St. Refrigerator Magnet
The five years my husband, Frank, and I have lived in New York have been turbulent ones for the world, what with the Trump presidency and the pandemic. Not to mention the rise and fall of Quibi. Lest the universe get the idea that we can’t take a hint, we have decided to move. Frank […]
Script
While I was in college, I wrote a very meta, very pretentious, very bad play called That Day This Day. It’s about Adam, a gay man from the South (ahem) whose coming-out to his family didn’t go well (ahem, ahem), so now he’s restaging the episode with a cast of his own choosing in order to […]
Poop Candle
My husband and I keep a candle and a book of matches on top of the toilet tank cover should anyone who uses the bathroom need to mask the odor of a momentous bowel movement. I call such an event a Poopapalooza. As in, “Whoa! It smells like somebody hosted a four-day Poopapalooza headlined by […]
Hanger
The clothes hangers in my apartment are like the Duggars of TLC: There’s a lot of them and they don’t really work. (Seriously: Do any of those people have jobs? Like, I get that their actual occupation is being on that horrible show, but do the parents or any of their multitudes of grown-ass offspring […]
Woodlawn Book
One of my last travel-writing assignments before the pandemic involved visiting a cemetery. If I had known we were on the precipice of a protracted period of death and disease, I would have advocated for a subject that was less morbid and on the nose. Then again, what locale wouldn’t have seemed poignant in retrospect? […]
Taboo
The worst party game ever created is of course Cards Against Humanity. Making racist, sexist, and transphobic jokes, even from a supposed ironic distance, is gross enough. But Cards Against Humanity goes a step further, requiring players to make somebody else’s prefabricated racist, sexist, and transphobic jokes. It’s like listening to an acquaintance recite lines from […]