A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
According to Bertrand Russell, “Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.” Ditto for men who like ultra-spicy food. They act like you’re supposed to be impressed when they order, say, the curry vindaloo at an Indian restaurant, and then they make a big show of not needing […]
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 knife is the king, and the big fork is the queen. Each spouse has a sidekick—the spoon (a duke) for the king, the salad fork (a lady-in-waiting) for the queen. Those are the roles I assigned the flatware whenever I’d find myself at a restaurant as a child. I would put the royal quartet […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
When my parents dropped me off at college, my mom gave me a laundry basket. Taped to the bottom were instructions, written in my mother’s perfect penmanship, for properly washing and drying clothes—tasks I had never attempted up to that point. I no longer have the cheat sheet, but, as I recall, its author was […]
“You go through this stuff like water,” my husband, Frank, said the other day when we were stocking up on La Croix. In addition to being unwittingly humorous (seeing as how La Croix is water, how else am I supposed to go through it?), the statement is true: I do drink a lot of carbonated water. […]
When it comes to movies, I have always been fine with being told what to think. As a kid, I’d watch squabbling film critics Siskel & Ebert on their syndicated TV series, and I’d be utterly swayed by the simple certitude of their thumb-based pronouncements. In fact, whenever they gave a movie two thumbs up, […]
When I was a kid, my favorite breakfast cereal was Lucky Charms, a blend of sugar-coated oats, marshmallows, and Irish stereotypes. The cereal’s corporate mascot is a leprechaun named Lucky. In 1980s TV commercials, cartoon children were always in pursuit of the small, green-suited figure so that they might capture his “magically delicious” marshmallow charms: […]
Indirect Objects 