A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
The box office success of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey suggests there’s a market for stuff based on ancient epic poems about arduous journeys following the Trojan War. That’s great news for me because it so happens that every August I write something here at Indirect Objects about The Aeneid, an ancient Roman […]
Apparently, college students are no longer capable of reading books. I guess they watched too many TikTok videos or became too dependent on AI summaries, so now they’re morons. I read all about it in The Atlantic. A college professor I recently met more or less confirmed the declining literacy of today’s youth when I […]
I’ve been living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for 5 years now. That’s as long as I was a resident of New York City, where I lived before moving here. I relocated with my husband, Frank, when he got a new job. I’ll admit the change required a period of adjustment. Our previous address was in Harlem, […]
Not long ago, I ran out of reading material during an out-of-town trip, so I dragged my husband, Frank, who was with me, inside the next bookstore we encountered. I asked him to pick out something for me, ‘cause I didn’t have access to my Books to Read lists and was therefore incapable of making […]
When I look back on my experience as a moviegoer thus far in life, I feel like I’ve seen a bunch of films. But if that’s the case, then how come whenever a movie comes up in conversation, I haven’t seen it? Or, to put it another way, when exactly did everybody watch The Matrix, […]
The photo on the holiday card sent out this year by my husband, Frank, and me shows the pair of us at the ancient Greek theater in Taormina, Sicily, where we went in September. The image came out more grainy and low-res than we wanted. It looked better in the digital mock-up when we were […]
When my husband, Frank, and I were in Vietnam in the spring for our annual Big Trip, the theme of the vacation seemed to be Hats ‘n’ Holes. We kept being led into tunnels and caves and such, and we kept donning various types of headgear, such as pith helmets in the caves (presumably to […]
When I was growing up, my family had a World Book encyclopedia set. This print compendium of knowledge was arranged in alphabetical order across 22 volumes bound in red leather. At the time, encyclopedias were a common sight on living room bookshelves and in public libraries. The primary purpose of the books was to give […]
Earlier this year I met a reader of this blog who told me my work reminded him of Erma Bombeck. Since I hardly ever write about my experiences as a harried suburban mom, I assume what the reader meant is that he finds me funny. Or maybe witty, which is what you call a funny […]
These days I really only drink alcohol when I’m out of town. Course, I’m a travel journalist, so my habits hardly qualify me for the Temperance League. And okay, fine, sometimes, even when I’m not out of town, I’ll imbibe at social functions. Fortunately for my liver, I attend as few of those as possible. […]
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