One More Salute to Vanity

Because men are heavier, Yahoo.

Tue, 14 May 2013 20:58:55 -0700

Because men are heavier, Yahoo.

Love is worrying.

Tue, 14 May 2013 18:33:09 -0700

Love is worrying.

A friend recently reminded me that every single person you meet...

Sun, 12 May 2013 08:36:43 -0700

A friend recently reminded me that every single person you meet grew inside of another person. Happy Mother’s Day to my gigantic network of wonderful women.

Feeling festive? You can read my piece on my two mamas over on The Hairpin.

This is just to say that this particular American Apparel dog...

Wed, 08 May 2013 19:25:00 -0700

This is just to say that this particular American Apparel dog model has won for Coolest Attitude today.

I have ordered exactly one very tasteful (and supportive)...

Mon, 06 May 2013 18:33:00 -0700

I have ordered exactly one very tasteful (and supportive) nightgown from this catalog and am now the owner of some smart fruit stickers for my spring correspondence. Is this the opposite of email marketing?

"Mr. Bush might singlehandedly reverse the trend toward smaller portions, nouvelle cuisine, and..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 10:00:20 -0700

“Mr. Bush might singlehandedly reverse the trend toward smaller portions, nouvelle cuisine, and low-calorie snacks. After all, when Mr. Bush expressed a taste for pork rinds, sales jumped 11 percent and he was ordained ”Skin Man of the Year” by pork-rind makers.”

- The New York Times on President George Bush Sr.’s hatred of broccoli, March 23rd, 1990. The entire article is full of delicious gems, including his tendency to top oat bran and yogurt with Butterfinger pieces. He once fed White House guests creamed chip beef, colloquially known as Shit On a Shingle and found in my grandmother’s recipe box.

"When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with..."

Sun, 05 May 2013 14:27:27 -0700

“When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax.”

- Flannery O’Connor, on her first brush with celebrity.

98.5% Fat Free

Sun, 05 May 2013 09:45:00 -0700

so much depends
upon

a foil yogurt
lid

glazed with tongue
traces

beside the stainless
sink.

Cool nightmare-inducing adjectives, NBC News.

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:34:00 -0700

Cool nightmare-inducing adjectives, NBC News.

I wrote about invalid cookery in Victorian-era cookbooks and my...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 11:39:26 -0700

I wrote about invalid cookery in Victorian-era cookbooks and my own modern convalescing for SAVEUR Magazine:

“Food is the only source of human power to work or to think,” Farmer writes. With that, I took strength from her suggested menu for a patient suffering from dilated stomach and prepared a meal of water toast. (This is not to be confused with toast water, another popular recipe of the time used to treat nausea.) Water toast involves dropping slices of dry toast in boiling salted water, quickly removing them, and then smothering them in butter On the palate, it left something to be desired (the water eliminated any crispness, to my mind the essential quality of toast), but I’ll venture to guess most would prefer it over toast water, which leaves out the bread entirely and is essentially a very sad starchy broth.

Autocorrect makes no mistakes in my daily conversations. Didion...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:06:21 -0700

Autocorrect makes no mistakes in my daily conversations. Didion I have a good birthday? I Didion indeed.

Emotional Hoarding

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:07:43 -0700

Reheat 3-day old chicken teriyaki while listening to Unwritten.
Double down on Benadryl. Watch 10-10,000 hours of cable news.
Click, click, click through photos of your ex-boyfriend’s baby on Facebook.
Google “real ghost photos” whenever insomnia strikes.
Fall asleep in a pile of dirty laundry while re-watching Terms of Endearment on Netflix.
Listen to that Joan Osborne album your aunt bought you in 1995 with a bottle of rosé.

Today is where your book begins.

Today I turn 29 years old. You would most likely be not at all...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:32:00 -0700

Today I turn 29 years old. You would most likely be not at all surprised to know that my outfit choice for the day is quite similar to the above style I deemed ideal for constructing towers out of VHS tapes in 1989.

On Mondays We Reveal Unjust Dominant Ideologies

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:10:00 -0700

While exploring old hard drives I found my final ideology critique exploring the power dynamics of Mean Girls complete with a photo timeline of Cady’s transition into “Girl World.” So really, nothing has changed except now I could have just submitted everything in GIF form.

Memory Bank, 2004

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 06:12:00 -0700

While on AIM we try to make up for distance by making our relationship more important than it really is. He asks me my favorite word. Petrichor, I tell him. The smell of rain on dry earth. Because while I’ve never said it out loud, or used it in a sentence, had it arrive, top of mind, that is what I want it to be.

I’m tempted to top off having over a foot of my digestive...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:44:00 -0700

I’m tempted to top off having over a foot of my digestive system removed by enrolling in a Dengue vaccine study all in one month but I think my adventures in extreme health care are hopefully over. Sorry, Group Health.

From 1983 to grandparenthood, lesbian group’s shared...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 08:31:00 -0700

From 1983 to grandparenthood, lesbian group’s shared history

My big gay family was featured on KPLU this morning. You can listen to us here.

Happy Easter, you guys.

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 12:04:13 -0700

Happy Easter, you guys.

Great Things Have Happened

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:25:50 -0700

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, “Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time.” But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I’m sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

“Is that all?” I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited
before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

- Alden Nowlan

(via versesversus)

Notes On Healing, So Far In the hospital, I dreamed that my PICC...

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:48:37 -0700

Notes On Healing, So Far

In the hospital, I dreamed that my PICC line, the long, thin IV tube running from inside my arm to just above my heart, turned into Jessica Lange wearing a bright red blazer, sitting beside me and nodding knowingly.
The ends of my colon were reattached with silk thread.
Every morning I put on my mother’s puffy black winter coat and shuffle once around the block, after which I feel as if I’ve been hit in the stomach with a baseball bat.
Muslims, Unitarians, Jews, Catholic nuns, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Buddhists, all sorts of Christians, and everyone in between have offered to pray for me. Everyone but the Mormons, although I think I have my bases covered.
A blind woman I’ve never met gave me 100 hanging origami cranes for healing.
Sometimes people are so generous and kind that I am unable to produce any worthwhile thanks outside of wanting to type in all caps with my heart.