A little more than three and half weeks ago, when I was moping around on a Thursday morning, contemplating the COVID and its accompanying existential abyss, my best friend called during my pre-work coffee and told me, if it was okay, she was kind of thinking about coming down to stay for a little while. I told her, without hesitation, that it was a fine idea, and then experienced a couple waves of tacit five […]
I was walking down in the woods today thinking about how this would be graduation weekend, were it not for the pandemic. Graduation weekend is always kind of a nightmare in a college town. I stay in, mostly. Sometimes I try to go home because graduation lines up tidily with Mother’s Day. Last year, I drove up to Virginia for the day to have lunch with Mom and Nana at this grand old, ersatz-Tudor hotel […]
In the unlikely event that these posts sort of useful historical document, I should probably stop and address what a fairly average attack of the 2020 Pandemics is/was like, if you, future person has stumbled across this in the future. So we’re cruising through the most gorgeous weekend ever and its myriad pleasures and it’s late Sunday afternoon and I decide to take a negroni to the deck and pull up the Times because I’m […]
During the first few weeks of quarantine, when I was falling apart all over the place, all the time, with such wide and varied peaks and valleys, I worried I might get be turning into a teenager again, I kept my brain together and myself truly off the precipice with a little gin and a whole lot of exercise. As a person who has never met a darkness she couldn’t lean right into, I accepted […]
A Complete List of Fictional Projects I Planned To Work On During Quarantine, Updated: 1) Untitled Pirate Novel: A maximalist romp through an anachronistically glam rock late 17th/early 18th century, featuring lots of gender-bending, adventure, romance, dumb pirate jokes and occasional trenchant commentary about both feminism and colonialism. Sample Passage: ‘The inn was actually called the Diving Mermaid, but the name was so regularly misread, even the owners started referring to it by its more […]
Ah, Monday. Let’s check in with the world. Does Europe think we’re a failed state? Yes. Are people dying? Yes. Are we just like, “f-it, let’s let them die?” Yes. Is there any halfway decent central response or plans for a halfway decent central response yet? No. Is the broad media/health care/economic consensus that the only choices are 1) Die alone at home without job or purpose, during indefinite quarantine, having never seen a friend/family […]
About exactly a year ago today, I flew to New York to visit my best friend on the same day that Longreads published a piece I wrote about a nanny I had when I was thirteen. By the time I got off the plane, I was informed that I was getting a crazy number of reads, which was shocking. I didn’t think the piece was that special, but strangers seemed to love it. Three days […]
Day 44 of my confinement. They said, if you wanted to keep psychologically fit during the crisis (and if you wanted to sell your house without having to repaint the interior of your coat closet), you shouldn’t do the whole Count of Monte Cristo etching-the days-passed-into-the-wall thing, but they also said you shouldn’t study the humanities in college if you wanted a job or get a short haircut if you were a single, heterosexual round-faced […]
Dear People In Charge: You don’t know me. I’m a peon, a single, middle-aged, middle class woman at peak invisible. I live in a small town. I write trivial things that you’ve probably never read. I’m maybe not even the most well-known writer with my same name to write trivial things that you’ve never read. In my professional life, I work in the shallow end of the communications industry in a not-terribly populated side of […]
Thursday night, in between a personal Wu-Tang Clan dance party and the conclusion of a slightly drunken pound cake baking session, I cooked up some frozen salmon I’d stocked for quarantine back in the days when going to Trader Joe’s still felt like a thing that didn’t require a battle strategy. The salmon tasted fine, but either it or the lettuce I used for the salad wasn’t and around 2:30am, things went south, or rather […]
