How a year of eating at home has ended my lifelong love affair
The other day, I was sitting on my couch, minding my own sweat-pant-wearing business, when an email landed in my inbox. An update from a blog I subscribe to. A new recipe for a kale and shaved brussels sprout salad. Upon opening this email, a painful malaise struck me, like a gut punch. I groaned aloud. My concerned husband shouted from upstairs, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Nothing.” But inside, I was thinking: Spare me. Spare me your stupid sprouts.
To be clear, it wasn’t actually the sprouts or the kale that bothered me. Those foods are fine. In normal times…
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Dogs offer so much more than just companionship
Dogs make great companions — that much we all know. When a dog comes into your life, you gain a loyal friend, a pal to keep your loneliness at bay, which has been particularly relevant in this era of social distancing. You have someone to talk to in silly voices and someone to talk about with your partner or friends. But dogs bring other benefits too.
I was lucky enough to call my dog Harpo family long before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19. However, he didn’t come to me under particularly fortunate circumstances. My parents, empty nesters in their…
Express Yourself
Sometimes, being a writer means letting go of your goals
We hear it incessantly: We’re living in unprecedented times. Something we hear just as often but talk about a lot less is this: We’re all under constant pressure to use this unprecedented time. Everyone, it seems, has been taking up hobbies, baking banana bread, nurturing houseplants and sourdough starters, developing and fine-tuning complex skin care routines. Time is a gift, and who are we to waste it?
By all accounts, this past year should’ve been a boom time for creatives. While we were once expected to pick out outfits and commute and dine in restaurants and attend friends’ gigs and…
Are we finally ready to stop worshipping at her altar?
Once upon a time in teen America, you had to be white, slim, and pretty to be popular. You had to be sexually desirable. You had to dress well. The boys had to want you; the girls had to want to be you. It certainly helped if you came from a well-off family, although there was a certain allure to being gorgeous and from the wrong side of the tracks. Maybe you were “easier.” A little more desperate. …
It’s easy to follow health guidelines, but it’s much harder to look away
Once upon a time, social media was a way to connect with people we knew — Classmates.com, Myspace, Facebook. Then it was a way to connect with people we wanted to know and who hopefully wanted to know us — Twitter, Tinder, LinkedIn. Now, it’s voyeuristic, a place for us to peer into enviable lives — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. We still want to know these people, but these people don’t even know we exist. They’re personalities, and we’re just numbers.
Much has already been written online about friendships and values and pandemic-era behavior and how they will affect our relationships…
This Is Us
On the twee language of pregnancy and motherhood
Like many areas of life, pregnancy has its own jargon. In corporate America, we think outside the box. In the tech world, we’re all about seamless integration. In pregnancy, we inquire about Baby. Not the baby. Not your baby. Just Baby, like this is Dirty Dancing. We might ask who else is preggers, or if there are any other preggos in the house. We request bump pics. We provide encouragement with Mama, you got this!
It’s embarrassing to admit, but one of the things that always put me off the idea of becoming pregnant was the language. I felt the…
Work-study was my way to a college education. But was spending time on a useless, low-paid job really worth it?
Ask someone about the worst job they ever had and you’re likely in for a story. A babysitting gig from hell. A Steinbeck-esque tale about toiling in a fish-canning factory. Workplace bullying. Sexual harassment. Safety violations. Unreasonable demands. Unpaid overtime.
I’ve had some bad jobs, but to be honest, I’m not even sure my worst job qualifies as a job since I didn’t get paid. In the most generous terms, I bartered my time for passage into higher education. In the harshest terms, you might call it indentured servitude.
College was sold to millennials as a necessity — the operative…
This Is Us
It’s about so much more than advice-seeking and finger-pointing
Like thousands upon thousands of other people, I love reading “Am I the Asshole?” on Reddit. I first encountered AITA through Twitter when an account that reposts particularly juicy threads kept popping up in my timeline. One thing led to another, and I’m now an unabashed asshole addict. Every few days for the past few months, I log on and get my fill of roommate drama, relationship woes, and family fallouts. Locked down and hungry for human interaction, I find a sense of connection here, though I’ve never actually commented or voted on a thread. …
What Hollywood gets wrong and what we can do to make it right
We all know how it goes. A girl-woman is fine one moment — sitting at her desk or in a meeting. The next, she’s making an abrupt exit from her high school classroom or the glossy magazine where she works. She races to the bathroom, where she throws open a stall door, vomits, clings to the toilet like a life raft.
Often, a sassy classmate or colleague is posed at the sinks, ready to give the girl-woman a knowing look. A look that says, you’ve puked your guts out, I know it, you know it, there’s only one way this…
On the beauty of food, delivered to your door
When my unemployed father, in his forties, took a job as a pizza deliveryman, I felt a cloud forming over our family’s life.
I’m certain that when my father applied for this role, he lied and told the boss that he was just looking for some “extra money.” A side hustle, if you will, but here I won’t, because no one called it that then. Whatever way he wanted to frame it, the reality was, he couldn’t find a “real job” to replace the one he’d lost, and so we were broke. Poor, even. A downward financial spiral that would…
