The Meryl Streep onion-slicing montage in “Julie & Julia,” a movie I watched once eleven years ago, haunts me…More
insult and quarantinjury
The other week I read some WSJ puff piece about how locked-down Americans doing burpees for the first time keep spraining their ankles. I rolled my eyes at all the bumbling idiots, like I’m not someone who once tweaked my neck so badly shampooing my hair that I couldn’t turn my head for a week,…More
i love the passing of time
I mostly find it futile to read about other people’s preposterous ideas of the future, although it feels silly to say that from here in the middle of a pandemic during which we entertain ourselves by beaming our faces into one another’s homes.More
the name is the thing
Maybe it’s magical thinking: If I don’t name it, it can’t be. It’s a backwards Ursula K. LeGuin. More
a girl can dream
I tend to have vivid, emotionally draining dreams that ratchet up in intensity until, just before I wake up, I realize with tremendous relief that I’m dreaming. So yes, that’s what I’m waiting for here: the end of the dream, or the deus ex machina, or whatever it is that doesn’t involve me sitting in…More
no pomp due to circumstance
To the second-semester senior who has been unceremoniously dispatched home by the coronavirus, just when you were about to depart on your victory lap…More
creeping crud
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. More
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…More
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…More
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…More
