I used to joke that I would regret all of the postapocalyptic novels I read in my twenties and here I am, regretting all of the postapocalyptic novels I read in my twenties.
all-day dining at the homesick restaurant
(With gratitude and apologies to the inimitable Anne Tyler.) I was in Palo Alto this past week for work. Now that I live in Europe, my once- or twice-yearly visits to the California office are a jet-lagged flurry of hugging people I thought had been fired long ago. (To be fair, they obviously think the… Continue reading all-day dining at the homesick restaurant
i’ll scratch your back…
As I start thinking about how to eventually market myself as an author, I’ve set myself to actually participating in social media. In case you’re wondering how that’s going for me, a misanthrope, here is an actual excerpt from my diary this morning: “It’s nice to see how engaging on social media begets engagement on… Continue reading i’ll scratch your back…
swallowing the world
"To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world." — Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children Where you were when When September 11th happened, I was twelve, a couple weeks into seventh grade. The footage on television was terrifying, but my classmates and I had never been to New York, and it felt consequential but… Continue reading swallowing the world
we can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far
I can't figure out why YouTube wants me to watch Carpool Karaoke and segments from the Ellen Show so badly.
woo-woo girls
I approach anything that's not, e.g., reading Proust with a keening sense of shame and thus never learn to do it properly. The trouble is that I've also never read Proust, either, putting me in this liminal space where I have neither Instagram followers nor highfalutin lit-bro cred.
michigan seems like a dream to me now
I could write a solemn thesis about how my travels are shaping my view of my homeland, but my worst nightmare is accidentally becoming a sanctimonious travel blogger, so instead let me leave you with a brief list of probably-awful American things that I miss in spite of knowing better.
an office of one’s own
On reading in the 21st century: “God help me if I have to wade through another gratuitous description of the hysterical wife of a put-upon man chafing at the bonds of corporate servitude and his milquetoast children. Give me Eileen and her constipation any day.”
try the grey stuff; it’s delicious
I lived with four of my best friends when we were seniors in college. Our chore strategy was that we lived in filth until someone got fed up and rage-cleaned, and then they got to passive-aggressively sulk everyone else for the rest of the week as a reward.
someone else’s mom’s minivan
I don't think about childhood often, but the turn of the year always brings me back to that little burst of pleasure I felt preparing the year's first sheet of college-rule notebook paper, when I wrote the new year for the first time.
