LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP 0:00 / 0:00 Look Before You Leap As I look back on my life, I’ll have to admit that I’ve been plagued by less than stellar judgment. I’ve identified three categories: pure bad judgment, bad judgment with good intentions, bad judgment with bad intentions. After college, I lived next to a […]
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DREAMING 0:00 / 0:00 Dreaming I write for a living, which means I sit in front of a computer for hours. For years, I balanced on the edge of a rigid wooden chair. Later, I moved to a tipsy rolling chair. Neither provided back support. Four years ago, I bought a metal chair for a
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SPARKS OF JOY 0:00 / 0:00 Sparks of Joy My Facebook feed is full of photos of shipshape garages, orderly closets and neatly stacked undies. Marie Kondo, an organizing consultant, encourages people to sort their belongings. And, if an object does not spark joy, toss it. Some of my belongings do not elicit a spark
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FLYING ATTACK OWLS Courtesy of The Daily Progress 0:00 / 0:00 Flying Attack Owls As a child, I never wanted to sleep in a room with an open closet door. When I was about five, my parents took us to visit friends in Buffalo, New York. I bunked with Jimmy, also about five, who pointed
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WORDS YOU NEVER WANT TO HEAR 0:00 / 0:00 Words You Never Want to Hear A couple of weeks ago, at the end of a cut, my stylist said, “Hmm…your hair looks strange.” A week of high humidity had made me resemble a poodle. Perhaps that’s what she meant. As you might imagine, her statement
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ON THE ADVISABILITY OF SWEARING 0:00 / 0:00 Swearing Recently, after four attempts, a TSA agent failed to collect a non-fuzzy image of my fingerprints. No matter how firmly I pressed and no matter how I positioned my hand, the device would not record my prints crisply. Maybe I should be grateful. My inability to
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LIVING FOREVER 0:00 / 0:00 Living Forever My dad died a few years ago. Even though he needed a pacemaker to regulate his heart and he was a brittle, non-compliant diabetic, his death still shocked us. Often, my father would start a sentence, “If I ever die….”–as if the inevitability of his death was nota foregone
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IF I WAS YOU 0:00 / 0:00 If I Was You In my hip hop class, we dance to a Meghan Trainor song whose lyrics are: “If I was you, I would wanna be me, too. I would wanna be me, too.” People perk up during this song. We’re more likely to strut, rather than
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FROG IN HER THROAT 0:00 / 0:00 Frog in Her Throat I used to phone my grandmother every Saturday morning. Although Benedetta died few years ago at age 106, on some Saturday mornings I still wake up ready to dial her number. We’d start out the same way: “How are you, Grandma?” “I’ve got a
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LOCALLY SOURCED PET TO TABLE DINING 0:00 / 0:00 Pet to Table Dining Growing up, I desperately wanted a pet. We lived in a tenement bordered by an asphalt driveway in the back and a concrete sidewalk in the front. Our apartment was so tiny that we needed only a cook stove to heat the
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