February 2012
3 posts
Valentine's Day
I am a terrible evangelist. I was raised Catholic in an era when the Church was doing okay financially and spiritually and hadn’t yet encased itself in that patina of desperation and political authoritarianism, hadn’t yet asked its members to impose themselves on anyone. Even then, I couldn’t muster the small amount of proselytizing energy required by my faith—the ability...
Things I Like About the Person I Married
He always gets roped into some form of participation in the Vagina Monologues Week bake sale at the medical school.
I can never tell if it’s based on his enthusiastically cultivated reputation as a feminist, a baker, or a fan of vaginas.
But really, he makes some damn good cinnamon rolls.
January 2012
5 posts
Containers
Lately I smell like death. That is not a turn of phrase: I smell the way my grandparents’ house did in the many slow years that they were dying. I wash my bathrobe, I shower, I brush my teeth, but I can’t escape it. It’s sweet like bananas, tangy like mown grass, with a faint odor of cigarettes smoked in decades past, which my grandparents did with gusto in the 60s, and which my uncle did in...
“Shopping for clothes is like masturbation—everyone does it, but it...”
– Lorrie Moore, Self-Help
Let the record show:
This may not have been the weirdest or the worst week I can remember, but it has certainly been the longest.
Things It Is Too Early For
Facebook
Seeing your mom comment on your friends’ walls in real time
Your mom commenting on a photo of your ex-boyfriend holding a baby, “Both your faces are priceless!”
Your ex-boyfriend’s response of, “Thanks! He was actually farting in my hand at the time!”
“Interviewer: What do you think most about during the day?
Stephen Hawking:...”
– I don’t know whether this is cute or condescending. Probably both.
[via New Scientist]
December 2011
1 post
12/21
1.
“My poems have often been described as very self-conscious. This is sometimes given as a reason for disliking them. In most of my poems, the speaker is aware that he’s trying to say something on an occasion, under pressure, and that the saying is difficult.”
— Mark Halliday, Poetry Daily
2.
Before
Before you were you, before your bicycle appeared under the street-lamp, before you...
November 2011
4 posts
Things I'm still trying to figure out:
Five days before Occupy Harvard put up largely-unoccupied tents in the Yard, I met a man named Troy. I was exiting a Harvard administrative building after an interview with the university’s dining director for a story I was working on. I got turned around on the first floor, and bumped into a 30-something black man in a big, puffy coat, who was being led by an exasperated middle-aged woman....
“Yeah but he’s a different generation than [redacted]. He doesn’t...”
– #LTRproblems
3 tags
“I’d change a few things about the article if I could. I wrote it in a week...”
– I think it’s safe to say I love Kate Bolick. The way a lot of women I know felt about her Atlantic cover on women and marriage is the way I feel about her (several) public remarks on long-form journalism: she’s very subtly, very gently pulling back the curtain on it and revealing just...
Everyone is drunk at the office
O: spit on the hobo
you see that's why we shouldn't have kids
bad
my stomach hurts
damn borders
me: hahaha
A PROFESSOR I WAS TRYING TO INTERVIEW FOR A STORY JUST DIED
AND I FOUND OUT THROUGH A PRESS RELEASE
O: :(
omg
me: hahaha
: (((( is right
O: that's the worst
me: this day
O: guac
me: he was 89
it's not entirely unexpected
O: i should be wearing my helmet
October 2011
4 posts
“How do you all feel about guys who get with a ton... →
unshared:
summerstaycation:
indiemaiden:
This article was really useful in helping me discern just what it is that I want when a lonely mood hits me. I’m more than happy living in my room alone; it’s the support system that I need to concentrate on developing more fully. This may require me to stop leaving so many people behind every time I relocate myself. It may also require letting more...
One final addendum: Slate offers an interesting... →
via Kate Bolick herself (again, so magnanimous! and her 13 tweets thus far are pretty hilarious. Yeah, I want to be friends with this lady)
(Also, I realize I am really annoying when I talk about marriage. I should either rename this blog Justifying Marriage to Myself: It’s Not So Bad! or stop blogging about it altogether.)
“How do you all feel about guys who get with a ton... →
indiemaiden:
This article was really useful in helping me discern just what it is that I want when a lonely mood hits me. I’m more than happy living in my room alone; it’s the support system that I need to concentrate on developing more fully. This may require me to stop leaving so many people behind every time I relocate myself. It may also require letting more people in. Food for introspective...
No babies for crybabies
shitmystudentswrite:
Temperament is very heritable because no normal woman wants to reproduce with a man that cries when he can’t find his socks.
Basically.
September 2011
4 posts
2 tags
the ragbag: the continuing adventures of t. s.... →
ragbag:
many people know that t.s. eliot was a highly successful banker. but did you also know that he wrote poetry?
one day, i. a. richards had a run-in with one of eliot’s bosses at lloyd’s bank and learned the following about his banking prospects:
Bank Official: Tell me, if you will—you won’t…
This should give hope to anyone who’s ever had coworkers.
Unrelated Things Coworkers Have Said to Me in the...
Coworker, at his own going away party: We have to keep in touch, OK? I feel like we were just getting to be friends! I was starting to have half a crush on you.
Me: Dude what the fuck, you’re married. You can’t talk about work crushes.
Coworker: That’s why I said half. Are we Facebook friends?
Me: No.
Coworker: We should be Facebook friends.
Me: I don’t know, do you...
Making meaning
I’m late to this. I was late to it the first time around, too.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I and roughly 25 other girls in my theology class were the last in our 1,000-person school to learn the World Trade Center had been attacked. By the time we emerged from the only classroom in the building that did not have a television (it was the chapel, technically, but space constraints meant classes were held...
This week so far
My husband just spent 43 hours in a 51-hour period in the hospital.
The last time I saw him was this morning, when he got home at 7 a.m. and fell into bed as I was getting out of it.
The last time I spoke to him was two days ago, when he got home past dinnertime and had one hour before he had to go to bed for a 3 a.m. wake-up call.
I lied: I didn’t get out of bed until 8:45.
In related news,...
August 2011
4 posts
Stupidly apartment hunting, again
Me: There's so much space, I don't even know what I'd do with it.
Megan: You could take up painting.
Me: You could come live with us.
Megan: I could write my dissertation there.
Me: You could paint your dissertation there!
Unrelated instances of people only remembering...
In this edition, I catch up on four years of lost time with with a deeply religious old friend who just married her high-school sweetheart:
“He is like a deep, deep river of fortitude, calm and wisdom. He’s never failed me. WHICH I realize probably sounds hilarious given your memories of more of a Pauly Bleaker. I’ll never forget how after prom or something you were like -...
Submitted by Josh, general labor for a dirt and...
It’s 95 degrees and the humidity is 80%. People don’t understand that. People see a man with a shovel in his hand working on a job site and think he’s lazy because he’s just standing there. What they don’t see is the struggle going on inside your brain. The part of you that has lived in the wild for millions of years is saying it’s too exhausting,...
July 2011
6 posts
On being alone
For the first time in quite a while I find myself alone on a regular basis. I wake up alone, which is terrible (although Bjorn always leaves the coffee pot half full for me, a nice touch). I have a hard time getting out of bed when I don’t have the added incentive of a sleeping person to pester into consciousness and/or the hope that that person will make me eggs while I fix my hair.
It...
“This was for me, as for so many people I know, several years of determined work...”
– Dwight Garner on college. Yep.
Things you can do in college that make you a...
Steal a special-shaped beer glass from a bar because “it’s got my favorite brewery’s logo on it!”
Tip 15 percent. Sorry!
Add the clause “but not any of the unattractive ones” to the end of your request that your friend set you up with people he or she knows
Lie about movies you haven’t actually seen
Terms to explain to your husband
after you nearly avoid walking a girl he slept with down the aisle while filling in for him (sans tux) at his sister’s wedding rehearsal:
The known known: an official ex; a former long-term significant other; someone everyone knows you were fucking, regardless of how ill-advised said fucking might have been.
The unknown unknown: a one-night stand; someone your friends/family may have...
On work
I woke up this morning despairing. I have really been sucking at my job lately, for a variety of reasons (our move, Bjorn’s demanding summer hospital schedule, and my new side gig have constrained our free time and provided neverending distraction during work hours; universities are dead in the summer; I am hitting a pretty routine patch of writer’s block brought about by boredom and...
June 2011
2 posts
Reading-a-Bad-Feminist Confessions: Part 6 of an... →
She’s back on the blogging horse! You can read that to refer to me, or to LC:
A Bad Feminist Confession: I aspire to be am the hostess with the most-est. My friends find it endearing, my lover thinks it insufferable. (Theme parties: really not my stoic German’s cup of tea.) This weekend, I’m hosting a start-of-summer/end-of-Pride-Week BBQ. There will be rainbow flags and summery...
May 2011
3 posts
“Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a...”
– You win this round, David Brooks.
"I got so much hand I’m coming out of my gloves."
It is inevitable that I end up investing way too much of my self-image (and physical energy) in my job. In the past two days I have
lost at least a few hours of sleep worrying about how a story would be received
overslept due to said restlessness
sent two aggressively proactive emails about the nature of How We Do Business and Taking Responsibility and Catching Problems Before They Become...
“Leaving things you love is easier when you’re younger. You make stupid decisions...”
– I absolutely love the Townies series on NYTimes.com. This month’s columns, by Melissa Febos, are a pretty honest dissection of Not Being Young Anymore, a disease whose symptoms, I think, are probably more acute in New York.
[Edit: File with this under passages I think should be required...
April 2011
9 posts
File under: Awesome shit people say about me...
“So, Katie is wifed up now? What’s her husband’s name, BeeJorn? … She is such a hipster. Marrying a BeeJorn is the definition of hipster.”
[via gossipy bitch goodintentionsadversereactions]
No seriously guys
Sometimes my luck is so good I think I should just go ahead and accidentally get pregnant in hopes that it’ll just carry over for 18-20 more years uninterrupted. Because that is how lucky I feel today! Successfully-raise-another-human-being-without-turning-it-into-a-teen-mom-or-drug-addict lucky!
If anyone needs help picking PowerBall numbers...
me: [forwards Bjorn email about fantastic freelance opportunity that magically fell from the sky; subject line: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]
me: I totally want to do it
Bjorn: I wouldn't stop you
me: I misread it as 3 days/week, but it's only 3/month
me: so doable
Bjorn: Yeah, not bad at all.
me: yeah, and 600 bucks a month extra?
me: !!!!!!
Bjorn: That'll almost cover the imaginary shoe obsession I'm going to pretend you have!
The well-endowed university as socialist state
Cons:
working on holidays with names like “Patriots Day”
“from each according to his ability”
Pros:
cheap health insurance
the tampons in the bathroom are free!
Workplace etiquette
If you are considering eating a crunchy food but worry that your officemates may find it annoying, it is best to just not eat that food, because we do in fact hate you for it.
If you are considering eating a crunchy food out of an even noisier bag, why would you do that? It’s probably bad for you.
If you have a commemorative coffee mug featuring photos of the happy couple on your wedding...
Today in: Too Soon →
From the Times, a design buzzword that I do not think will be the next “shabby chic”:
A New Cottage in New Orleans With ‘Katrina Patina’
And of course, the kicker:
She adds, “I am one of those people who was very much a perfectionist, and Katrina really helped me just say it’s O.K. if it is not perfect.”
Well, thank god for that.
Things I Do Not Understand And Definitely Am Not...
thingsidontunderstandand:
“Push presents.”
Lolllll, this came up on my dashboard just as I was trying to understand the similarly mystifying concept of “engagement puppy.”
Reading-a-Bad-Feminist Confessions: Part 5 of an... →
I have been avoiding blogging about this lady for a while so as not to seem like a psychotroll, and also because I could write a fucking book on the psychodrama that is her current anti-marriage schtick, the TLDRness of which would surely lose me many followers.
But yowza, parsing time:
So if it isn’t clear: I am a complete and utter mess. I’m incredibly scatter-brained and would never, ever...
A Recipe for Really Fucked-Up Dreams About Sexual...
Homemade habanero-infused tequila
Fernet shots
Neoguri spicy seafood ramen
1 lesbian
2-3 bros
Mix well in large quantities and let marinate for 2-3 hours over meandering conversation about sexual politics. Garnish with inappropriate asides about the mutability of bisexuality, sprinkle with marriage guilt, and serve.
March 2011
5 posts
3 tags
Patricia Reinhardt and her husband, Tom Liszewski,... →
I believe that’s called a good dinner party.
Learned helplessness
Oddly enough, in the middle of a panic attack, it is extremely comforting to have someone say to you, “Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter if you stop making money” and to believe, for better or worse, that he’s probably right.
An unrelated list of things I believe define the...
Bear with me, guys. I have a theory that the whatever-the-aughts decade was the decade of the Tragic Final Act of the American White Male.
I know, I know, you’ve heard it before: Obama and more women go to college and blah blah blah. But I’m not really talking shifting demographics (no one ignores the reality in front of our faces quite like Americans!) or shiny national symbols...
Reading-a-Bad-Feminist Confessions: Part 4 of an... →
The biggest perk of not having a fame complex: you save a bajillion dollars because you don’t think the world requires of you a series of professional headshots.
For more in the series, go here or here or here. Or just stop now.
"The difference between Dada and barbarism/Is the...
Sometimes you just want to read some Jack Spicer but no bookstores have decent poetry sections anymore, so you Google “Jack Spicer” and then spend half an hour reading about the /b/ “You got Jacked” meme instead, and then you hate yourself.
Regardless, here’s a great Spicer poem, which I discovered in 2008 while copyediting a review of My Vocabulary Did This to Me...