This is what I am fucking sick of: People with opinions. Not you. You can have all the opinions you want. I mean, I’d prefer it if you kept them to yourself — especially if you watch a lot of Fox News — but I am open to people having beliefs other than my own,Read more…
“Okay, Mom,” said my 17-year-old daughter, totally out of the blue not long ago. “How ugly is this guy?” We had been lying around our den one afternoon – along with her older sister and best friend from across the street – laughing and chatting about nothing in particular, when she asked her question. IRead more…
One morning last week, my 21-year-old son came into the kitchen and asked if I’d help him make a cup of coffee. Now, if any of you own one of those newfangled Keurig machines, like the one I have, you know that it’s fairly simple to operate. You open the doohickey and stick the plasticRead more…
I am a world-class procrastinator. Really, don’t even try to compete with me. You won’t stand a chance. I’m awesome at rationalizing why I should fold the laundry and make my bed and wipe the kitchen counters before sitting down to write. And chronic indecisiveness often results in a stack of papers collecting in a giantRead more…
Lately, I’ve taken to sitting at the head of the big pine table in my kitchen to write, my black-and-white slipcovered chair backed into the bay window that bumps out that back corner of the room. Outside the window over my left shoulder, there’s a tremendous amount of chattering these days coming from the finchesRead more…
When my oldest was a junior in high school, I couldn’t wait to start looking at colleges. He and I drove north over his spring break that year to stay with friends just outside Boston to visit a couple of schools, and you would have thought I was going to Disney World. Libraries! Dining halls!Read more…
The following is based on actual events. This. Totally. Fucking. Happened. Let me begin by issuing a disclaimer: I have never purported here to be particularly smart. And while I often seem to by trying to prove quite the opposite in the stories I share on my blog, hopefully I come off – at theRead more…
Someone I know had a miscarriage last week and when I called to tell her how sorry I was for her loss, she said she never expected to be so sad, and stopped to cry some more. “Just in disbelief,” she texted later, and I totally got it. I had three early miscarriages in myRead more…
I didn’t leave the United States until I was 23 and out of college. Up until then, the extent of my air travel consisted of a handful of trips to Florida and a visit to St. Louis to stay with my aunt and her family the summer my parents separated when I turned 12. AsRead more…
I have a tattoo. And if you have gotten any sense from this blog of the boring, pretty traditional kind of person that I am, then you understand that it is truly the weirdest thing about me. I never even really wanted one. The night I got it about a dozen years ago, I wasRead more…
