A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
I once had a job writing deal copy for Groupon. My coworkers and I were given a seemingly endless queue of discounted offers for laser hair removal and Thai food and stand-up paddleboarding lessons and so on, forever and ever, world without end. Our assignment was to transform the details of the deals into ostensibly […]
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, […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Last year I joined a gay book club. The selections are all by and/or about LGBTQ+ people (broadly defined), and the club’s members are all gay nerds (narrowly defined). We usually meet at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square on the last Wednesday of the month. Since I joined in fall 2023, every book […]
As of this month, I have maintained this blog about my belongings for 5 years. I am fairly pleased with how things are going, though the AI-generated feedback from WordPress, the platform I use to create this thing, seems less enthusiastic. Before publishing a post, WordPress now lets you click a button so that a […]
