Me vs. Slugs: Pandemic Edition
When the terrible virus was unleashed and our lives screeched to a halt, I planted a garden. My first. I tended it zealously, with the darting eyes of a suicide bomber. This was March, April, May, the world hijacked by hysteria. I could have watered my garden with tears after returning from the store rumored...
Ten Things You Need to Know About Listicles
1. It’s easy to disparage the listicle, that pseudo-article in the form of a list, that caterer to our tweeting, text-messaging, sound-biting, multitasking culture. Listicles can’t develop an argument, complicate it, revise and refine it. It’s the mode not of cause-and-effect but of oh-and-another-thing. It flouts consequences and elects slogans for presidents. 2. I’m part...
Hairy Credentials
Summary of Qualifications Nicole is a professional woman who wants to rock her Afro in business settings and still command respect. Her career includes ten years of camouflaging her true self to stay marketable and frying her mane to avoid frightening employers with her real hair texture. The consequences of her cover-up—a bald spot and...
A Review of John Hodgman’s Vacationland
At some point as I was dancing to 50 Cent on top of a red vinyl booth at Angel’s Rock Bar, Thursday night slid into Friday morning, and someone shouted “Happy birthday, Kevin! How’s it feel to be twenty-five?” “Shit,” I thought. “Twenty-five.” It’d never crossed my mind. By that age Mary Shelley had written...
Invisible Partners
On my mother’s refrigerator in Chiang Mai, Thailand, are pictures from my high school dances in Chicago, when we lived in bi-level as a happy immigrant family—Homecoming, the Sweetheart’s Dance, Prom. There are so many photos of me you can barely see the surface of the fridge, just a hundred smiling faces of Ira with...
What Bad Owners Say at the Dog Park
1. He’s friendly. 2. He never does that. 3. That’s his way of playing. 4. He’s still learning. 5. Pookie, come here. 6. He’s not so good on recall. 7. Pookie’s still learning how to listen, isn’t he? 8. Watch out for his leash! 9. Pookie, come! Come, Pookie! Are you listening? If you don’t...
Ode to Me
1 It’s true, in certain instances, I am better than others. I’m better than people who start their sentences with “no offense.” I’m better than people who don’t like many kinds of vegetables. I’m better than people who do not properly greet the mailman, even though given the chance, he will get your phone number...
Typos
“Maybe we’ll go wind tasting” Perhaps, but only if there’s time. We’ll sample many varietals: breeze, whisper, gale. Winds assume the flavor of the land in which they originate—a terroir—and vary by how long they’ve aged. Cup them first in your palms. Take your time (though I know your time is fleeting). Smell the nuances:...
Some Childhood Dreams Really Do Come True
Then I wanted to be a mermaid. But first, I needed the tits and the hair. Hair long enough that it fell in naked curves down my naked chest while I lounged on a rock, luring sailors with my song. Now I have tits and hair down to my ass. You’re probably expecting me to...
Laughing Through Life: Humor in Autobiographical Writing
“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” — E.B. White Jim Wayne Miller, in a 1993 address to the Fourth Festival of Appalachian Humor at Berea College in Kentucky said, “Humor and analysis go at things in altogether different ways. Humor puts things together—in surprising...
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