A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
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 […]
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 […]
This year’s Christmas tree came with a ribbon tied to one of the branches identifying the tree as a “North Carolina Fraser fir.” So I named it Treena Simone in honor of North Carolinian Nina Simone. Granted, the High Priestess of Soul wasn’t the holly-jolly type of entertainer we typically associate with the December holidays. […]
At the Southern Baptist megachurch my family attended when I was growing up, you were supposed to bring your own Bible to services, which were held Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday evenings—and that doesn’t even count Sunday school, choir practice, youth group, and periodic revival meetings. Not to mention the daily Bible classes and […]
August 6 was this blog’s first birthday. In the post that started off these discursive ramblings about the objects I live among, I tried out the Virgilian lottery—a form of soothsaying where you open Virgil’s works at random and whatever passage you land on is supposed to tell your fortune. So I flipped open my […]
Lately, I’ve been listening to a language-learning podcast to work on my Spanish. My husband, Frank, is a Spanish speaker, and when he’s angry, he really does rant in the mother tongue, à la Ricky Ricardo. I’d like to know what he’s saying about me. Besides, Frank has made an effort over the years to […]
I majored in theater at Northwestern. At the time, I figured that made sense given my interests, which included Sondheim and homosexuality. Technically, I majored in theatre since that’s how the word is spelled in the name of the university’s department overseeing skits and dance belts. But I prefer theater because here in the United States, theatre feels […]
Seems like I should have more mementos from the 11 years I was a freelance performing-arts journalist in Chicago. But I have no scrapbook full of saved programs or even a single past issue of the Chicago Reader containing my byline somewhere within the yellowing pages. The theater section of the Reader—which is the city’s alt-weekly—is where […]
I read something at each of my sisters’ weddings. The eldest, whose name is Nicole though everybody in the family calls her Nee, was the first to go. My text was Shakespeare’s sonnet 116: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” etc. The gist of the poem, according to the commentary in the […]
My first out-of-town travel-writing assignment after getting hired by Frommer’s in 2016 involved a tour of New Zealand. Talk about setting the bar high. And speaking of heights, bungee jumping was supposed to be part of the trip. Though I considered going over the brink, I ultimately decided not to, owing to some deficit of […]
Indirect Objects 