A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
I brought a sweater to a wedding I attended in El Salvador last year. I didn’t plan to wear the thing at the ceremony or reception, of course, but to one of the auxiliary events—a dinner on a beach. I figured the sweater would be appropriate since it’s made of relatively porous material and has […]
Mirror, mirror on the wall,Who has pores that aren’t small? That’s what I think to myself when I peer into the mirror mounted next to the sink in the bathroom. It’s one of those magnifying mirrors that supply a close-up look at your face to aid in personal grooming and to hurt your feelings. The […]
When my husband, Frank, works from home, he sits at a round table in a corner of the bedroom. His computer monitor points right at the bathroom door, so whenever he’s on a video call and I have to pee, I’m supposed to hold it until he’s finished so that his coworkers won’t see me […]
As far as I’m concerned, you can display your books however you like, provided you’re not one of those people who arranges books by color. I hate that. It’s disrespectful to the book and makes you look like the sort of superficial twit who quite literally judges a book by its cover. I’ve divided my […]
When I was a kid, my family referred to the TV remote as “the controls.” As in, Hey, pass me the controls! I wanna watch Family Matters ‘cause it’s 1991 and I gotta learn how to do the Urkel. I’ve never heard anybody else refer to a remote as “the controls.” Course, I’ve never seen […]
The height of my Sondheim fandom coincided with my first couple years of college. Some freshmen do keg stands; others hole up in their dorm rooms with the original cast recording of Anyone Can Whistle. I couldn’t tell you for sure why I was drawn to Stephen Sondheim’s oeuvre specifically. The standard explanation offered by […]
My new rice cooker looks to me like it has a face saying BLEHHGH. The eyes are the appliance’s Cook and Warm lights; the mouth and tongue are the on switch and its casing. The face kind of reminds me of Alfred Jarry’s drawing of Père Ubu. My husband, Frank, however, thinks the rice cooker […]
Around this time last year, I followed the 6-week self-improvement program laid out in a book called The Listening Path by Julia Cameron. The goal was to become a better listener. A key part of the regimen involved writing three stream-of-consciousness pages in longhand immediately upon waking each morning. And I mean immediately. You were […]
Three people I knew died in the fall—two of them on the very same day. That would be guidebook legend Arthur Frommer, who founded the travel media company I work for, and Kris Vire, my editor at Time Out Chicago back when I was a part-time freelance theater journalist. Because Kris and I came from […]
The front of the holiday card that my husband, Frank, and I sent out this year features three photos of us taken in sites we visited in 2024: the Xochimilco canals of Mexico City, the Santa Ana Volcano in El Salvador, and one of the Gilded Age mansions in Newport, Rhode Island. We should do […]
Indirect Objects 