A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
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? […]
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 […]
My preferred pizza toppings are onions, mushrooms, and green peppers. Before eating a slice, I’ll usually sprinkle it with grated Parmesan and crushed red pepper. That has been my M.O., pizzawise, for some time now, though my tastes have evolved over the years. When I was a child, I liked Pizza Hut’s saltine-esque thin-crust slices […]
With only a few exceptions, the toys belonging to my dog, Lucy, are made of cloth with squeakers inside. She had some plastic toys in her youth, but she would gnaw on them until she broke them up into little pieces. I was worried she’d swallow one of those bits and choke. So now her […]
To tell you the truth, I don’t really mind the oniony smell of human sweat. I mean, I wouldn’t buy a Yankee Candle in that flavor or anything. But B.O. doesn’t spark the level of disgust in me that it seems to set off in others. I take this as proof of my high regard […]
When I was a kid back in Arkansas, snow wasn’t unheard of, but it was always an event bordering on the miraculous. The heavens would open up and make the view from my bedroom window look like a Christmas card, and somehow that meant I got a brief reprieve from long division. It was enough […]
Back when we still lived in Chicago, my husband, Frank, came home from a street market one day with a stack of square ceramic coasters bearing ghostly photo collages depicting sites of regional interest. There’s a coaster each for the North Side’s Andersonville area, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Goodman Theatre, Evanston’s Northwestern University (my […]
In a literature course I took during college, the instructor once drew a parallel between The Odyssey of Homer and The Wizard of Oz. Each tale, he explained, centers on a protagonist (Odysseus/Dorothy) who takes a magical journey, relying on the assistance of one supernatural figure (Athena/Glinda) and plagued by the opposition of another (Poseidon/the Wicked Witch […]
Do you find that you grow less lactose-tolerant as the years roll on? It seems astonishing to me that during my adolescence I would start the day with a large glass of milk accompanied by a milk-filled bowl of cereal and not need to spend all of first period doubled over in agony. The past […]
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 […]
Indirect Objects 