A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
There’s a certain kind of boring person I find admirable—the kind with the confidence and consistency of character to put an insipid personality on full display without worrying about what others think. Some might see a lack of self-awareness in such a person. I see courage. I was at a get-together once, for example, where […]
The other day, my husband, Frank, showed me a crack in the enamel on our hideous chartreuse decorative vase. He said it looked as though someone had chipped the item and then made a clumsy attempt to repair the damage using superglue. The implication was that the sneaky someone who had carried out this inept […]
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 […]
I started dating my husband, Frank, almost 18 years ago; we met on October 2, 2006. If our involvement with one another were a person, it’d be old enough to join the military—probably the Navy, since that’s the gayest branch of the armed forces, owing in large part to the indisputable truth that sailors get […]
I’ve had my current cell phone ever since I had to replace the previous one because I dropped it into the ocean while trying to take a picture of a bear. This happened in British Columbia. I’m going to go ahead and assume bear encounters top the list of reasons cell phones get lost or […]
¡Hola! ¿Qué tal? Este es mi libro de español. Estoy aprendiendo español en el Centro de Educación de Adultos de Cambridge. Quiero aprender español porque mi esposo es puertorriqueño, y cuando él está enojado conmigo, yo quiero comprender lo que está diciendo. (“Por favor, profesora, ¿qué significa ‘pendejo sucio’?”) Me gusta mucho mi clase de […]
My husband, Frank, and I got married with virtually no fanfare, forethought, or guests at Chicago City Hall on February 7, 2015. Same-sex matrimony had become legal in Illinois the previous year and we had an afternoon free. Cue the Wedding March. We had already been together for more than 8 years by that point […]
Provided there’s no plague on, my husband, Frank, and I take a Big Trip each year. It’s unlikely to be the only journey we undertake from January through December, but the annual Big Trip does occupy the central position in our travel calendar. The Big Trip tradition began in 2009, when we went to Paris […]
Because I’m a writer, people sometimes assume I’ll like word games. Which makes no sense to me. Do you spend your leisure time human resourcing or whatever it is you do to earn a living? Thanks, but I get plenty of frustration and feelings of inadequacy from words during the day—I don’t need more in […]
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 […]
Indirect Objects 