I Feel Bad About My [*Waves Around Wildly*]

Book Review, Books, Inspiration, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio

What I Read January 2026

Thank you for being here. I mean that. There are, after all, many other things tugging at your sleeve for your attention. And yet, you’re moving your eyeballs down this screen while at least fourteen other tabs (literal/metaphorical) attempt to hijack your concentration. One of them is almost certainly bad news. One a recipe. One a person whisper-screaming about cortisol. Somewhere, something is on fire. Possibly a dumpster.

(You will probably not make that recipe, by the way. Close that tab.)

My point, if indeed I have one, is that focus is scarce. Heck, I’m having trouble focusing on this sentence I’m writing. The fact that you’re still here is either due to admirable determination or you’re experiencing a temporary failure of escape mechanisms. Or maybe you’re resting your thumb for a moment.

Still, here we are, clinging to the page like the mildly confused primates we are. Good for us!

Friend, I don’t need to tell you that January was awful. The news is a firehose of inhumanity. The weather has been making creative use of its worst instincts. People have been doing the same. We, the body politic, are fatigued and enraged. We’re cold. Our brains are pudding. It’s all just a grinding, cumulative awful.

As such, reading has been work this month. I’ve been bargaining, bribing, and staring at margins before turning pages. I reread the same passages multiple times and often still couldn’t tell you who anyone is or why they’re there. Are they in a room? A void? The DMV? (But I repeat myself.)

My brain, ever eager to help, kept suggesting alternatives to reading. Catastrophize! Scroll! Dissociate in the shower like a normal person! I know reading is good for me. My brain is in a big noping-out phase. Darn the puddingness of it.

It’s easy right now to feel like everything is stupid and terrible, and everyone is ridiculous, and we’re all trying to optimize ourselves into…I don’t know. What are we trying to optimize ourselves into this week?

ANYWAY, I read because I must and want to, and at some points it all opens up. I am not reading books right now to be transported. “Here” is fine. I know where everything is.

What I want andneed are books that affirm Yup, that’s a mess. Let’s poke it with a stick.

And I found some! Trust me, a lot of books were flung aside. There are scuff marks. SEND MAGIC ERASERS.

Nora Ephron (one of my January reads) reminds us that reading is both escape and the opposite of escape, a way to make contact with someone else’s mind when your own keeps short-circuiting.

In a moment when we keep mistaking performance for connection and proximity for community, good books feel like a refusal to join the grinding, cumulative, optimized, puddingish awful.

I’ll take it.

Which is all just to say, here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month:

  • On The Road by Jack Kerouac
  • I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron
  • Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.

On The Road by Jack Kerouac

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

On the Road is devoted to the idea that the journey matters more than the destination. Narrator Sal Paradise is happiest when he is on the go, scarcely letting the engine cool before thinking about his next departure. I, on the other hand, am happiest when I am on the couch, so it was hard to relate. Maybe this book hits differently for young men on the whole. Maybe it hits differently before you’ve learned that, no matter how fast you’re going, motion and purpose are not the same thing. On the Road spends a lot of time suggesting that they are.

Par exemple: “There was nowhere to go but everywhere” has done a lot of unpaid labor for On the Road for nearly seventy years. It promises freedom, transcendence, and meaning, preferably without responsibility, receipts, or a return time. In short, keep chugging and you will discover something profound.

Well, smack my jukebox and call me Fonzie.

(continued here)

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

It’s been tricky to find books I want to read and then tricky to finish books I start. Not sure what I needed this month other than, pitifully, some validation. Specifically, smart, funny validation. And for this, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck hit the spot while also inspiring me to write better. Or at least try to. I’m sure that brings some small relief to my intrepid band of readers.

Ephron notices what absolutely sucks and what absolutely does not suck and talks about it in great detail. She is irritated, observant, loving, and correct. These are qualities I respect.

(continued here)

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The epigraph to Cat’s Cradle is a cheerful little threat. “Nothing in this book is true.”

What a nice way to say, Relax. I’m only going to describe the collapse of civilization. No need to tense up.

You should know that this is a funny book. You should also know that being funny does not stop it from being horrifying.

Vonnegut is often called a gateway author, and maybe that’s because often people read him young and then spend the rest of their lives trying to find that exact flavor again: smart, fast, funny, devastating. “Gateway” suggests he is the some sort of charming, goofy doorman waving you through toward Real Literature

Nonsense. He’s serious and brilliant and immediate. Besides, if anything is going to ruin your day, it should at least get to the point and have a sense of humor about it.

The vibe is University of Chicago, all angles and bells and theorems. Sharp intellect, unpretentious, but exacting and impatient.

In other words, the vibe is impolite, wild-haired brilliance.

(continued here)

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

I do not believe in the concept of a “work family.” Families visit you in the hospital. Work sends an URGENT email while you’re in the hospital, then eliminates your position in Q3. The phrase “work family” exists so companies can feel moderately at-ease replacing compensation and boundaries with feel-good vibes. And yet, this is the sharp, pointy edge of Then We Came to the End. Offices still manage to feel intimate (and we, the public demanding to be entertained, love that. See: every workplace comedy ever.) We spend more time with our coworkers than with our friends. We know who drinks oat milk. We know who steals that oat milk. We know who cries in the bathroom. We know whose job we could probably do if things went sideways. Work dehumanizes people while demanding emotional, intellectual, and physical labor from them.

A lot of reviewers call Then We Came to the End a “workplace satire.” Yeah, sure, and a colonoscopy is “light touch diagnostics.” This book is about “business as usual,” where nothing is technically wrong, but everything feels wrong, and most of it probably is wrong on some level or another. Usually ethics.

(continued here)

And there be the January reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! Read any good books lately?

What Dangles From Your Trailer Hitch (Encore Post)

Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, , , ,

Bringing back a favorite from the archives, lightly edited for your pleasure.

Every great civilization eventually signals the exact moment it gives up. (See: bread and circuses; phrenology; Gérard Depardieu.)

I encountered what may be our surrender point at a red light.

While stopped, I was running through my usual litany of Big Thoughts (Did I turn off the stove? Did I accidentally Reply All? Will humanity survive the inevitable collapse of late-stage capitalism masked by hyper-niche consumer trends?)when my attention landed on the truck in front of me.

No. Truck implies mere conveyance. This was an iron colossus. One perhaps called The Dominator. Or The Reckoning. Or The Doom Hauler.

Being a lusty all-American vehicle large enough to have its own microclimate should have sufficed, BUT…

dangling from the hitch by paracord was a set of Truck Nuts.

If you are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar, Truck Nuts (or Truck Nutz) are plastic or rubber decorative testicles that people attach to the back of their automobiles.

The vehicular huevos festooning the back of the  —  I dunno, GMC Rumble Thumper? —  bobbed with needless enthusiasm as the engine idled.

These ornamental knackers weren’t even high-quality plastic, just the brittle material of cheap children’s toys that cracks on impact or warps in the sun. Bright blue unapologetic vulgarity.

I stared. I didn’t want to, but like Medusa, these marbles demanded eye contact.

Two questions came to mind:

1. Who is driving this be-nutted behemoth?

2. Just…why?

Naturally, I started profiling the driver. Cargo shorts despite wind chill. Thinks taxes are theft, turn signals are for betas, refers to women as “females,” owns at least two Tapout shirts, and once tried to fight a locker in high school.

When the light turned green, I pulled up next to the…let’s go with Chevy Thunder Tusk…and looked.

Stone-faced. Sunglasses. Holding large iced coffee.

A woman.

A woman who, I could tell with just a glance, has strong opinions about butter boards and somehow manages to be unbothered and deeply furious at the same time.

The Windows 95 error sound pinged in my head.

Question 2 came back. “Just…why?”

Clearly, there’s demand. Like it or not, an entire Truck Nut industrial complex exists, operating, presumably, within the legal parameters of commerce. There are factories and machinery. There is an entire logistics chain ensuring that no motor vehicle in America need remain ball-free. And of course, there are actual adults waking up, pouring coffee into World’s Best Dad mugs, and heading to a job where they debate proper ball-to-bumper ratios.

There was undoubtedly a prototype. Wind tunnel tests. Torque calculations. PowerPoints on market scalability. Some guy insisting, “We’re revolutionizing the industry!”

Enormous vats of melted plastic were poured into molds, cooled, popped free, and sent to a quality control specialist probably named Earl, who gave each a light tug to ensure structural integrity.

Then and only then were shrink-wrapped pallets of these faux family jewels distributed to gas stations, online marketplaces, and that one hardware store where someone’s always grilling hot dogs in the parking lot.

A marketing team surely worked on branding. Tough Nuts for Tough Trucks! Don’t Be a Ball-less Hitch! Freedom isn’t Free — And These Are Only $24.99!

All of this resulted in the owner of the Ford Fee-Fi-Fo-Fummer in front of me slapping down actual money. After purchase, they knelt behind their truck and tied these orbs of virility into place.

I remind you we once wrote the Constitution, built Chicago (twice!), and sent humans to the moon.

I remind myself that I used to write about civic responsibility, democracy, and motherhood.

And yet, here we are.

Still, was there meaning in these petrochemical gonads? Irony? Prank? Postmodern critique of gender norms? Radical rejection of patriarchal tropes through appropriation of male genitalia?

The social contract as envisioned by Rousseau was not designed for this. Democracy, human rights, collective dignity? Yes. Plastic testicles on the back of a Toyota Titan Howler? Absolutely not.

Hobbes believed life without government was “nasty, brutish, and short.” I generally agree, but argue that life with government has somehow produced a scenario where I’m stuck in traffic behind a Jeep Inferno Stallion, eyeball-to-clangers.

I cannot point to the exact section of the social contract that discourages such a thing, but I assume it’s located in the part about not making public spaces unbearable for everyone else. Or maybe tucked into an addendum called “This Should Really Go Without Saying.”

But if the driver in front of me didn’t care about the affixed Truck Nuts on her Honda Oblivion Rover, then the entire framework of cultural semiotics disintegrates. They mean nothing.

And if they aren’t anything, nothing is. Everything just sways pointlessly.

Perhaps material offers meaning. After all, there is something grotesquely poetic about the fact that the fake gonads are plastic. Plastic is eternal.

Glaciers will melt, cities will sink, and centuries from now when the Great Plains are waterfront property, an archaeologist —  probably also named Earl  —  will stumble upon slightly cracked, sun-bleached Truck Nuts. He’ll turn them in his hands and ask, “What god did these people worship?”

It’s not an unreasonable question. What else could they be other than an object of reverence? Is this who we are? Cheap, crass, oscillating as if to measure the time we have left before the entire country embraces hollow spectacle under the hazy guise of “I’m just asking questions”?

Or maybe we worship the in-your-face part.

The woman in the truck zipped off with the patriarchal baubles wobbling behind her, she and they blissfully unaware of my Big Thoughts.

I sat there, eating her proverbial dust, realizing two things:

  1. You cannot parody a culture that’s already doing it for you.
  2. At some point Truck Nuts will come factory-installed. Standard.

And only Earl will understand the horror.

Face-Planting and Whatnot

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, Parenting

Yes, I Want Fries With That

A small note:

Things are horrifying right now. This isn’t an attempt to pretend otherwise. In the past, I’ve written about what’s happening in the world, In the past, I’ve written about what’s happening in the world, which got some…responses. I’ll write about that soon, because it’s important. Today, I’m choosing a tiny thing that makes my brain unclench for ten seconds.

Many of us are fighting on a lot of fronts, and (regrettably) that sometimes involves me deploying dumb humor. Or something dumb-humor adjacent. (*mutters something about containing multitudes, then clicks out of italics*)

I don’t like fishing. I don’t like wearing damp pants and pretending it’s relaxing to stare at water while someone argues the relative merits of lures and crankbaits.

I don’t even like aquariums that much. I like dolphins. Dolphins are not fish. They shouldn’t be in aquariums, though, because if a creature is smart enough to understand captivity, you are officially running a prison.

This is all just to say that I am not fishing for compliments. I’m telling a moderately funny story about questions.

SO.

The other week, I went into a beauty store with my daughter. We went in because we like to sniff perfumes and sample the lotions. We also went in because Mother Nature had turned winter up to “hostile.” This was at one of those outdoor malls, and the architect must have gone through life without ever personally experiencing wind chill. We went in to be somewhere with flattering lighting and tubes of coconut-scented things that soothe chapped lips.

I walked in cosmetically questionable. My hair was auditioning for Gorgon! The Musical!

Sidenote: my hair doesn’t usually behave. It’s fine. I work from home. My dog doesn’t care. My husband loves me for my inner beauty and because I’m fricking hilarious, which means my ‘do is free to express itself.

Beauty stores do not operate on this value system, FYI.

ANYWAY, there were roughly fifty employees and two other customers in the joint. The folks who work there are extremely kind, ridiculously attractive, and really attentive. If you even cast a glance at something that may or may not make you look like some sort of elvish tart in a middling fantasy series, a sales associate will apparate and ask if you’ve considered a serum.

Let’s set the scene more clearly. I had attempted “natural makeup,” which takes twice as long and still makes you look like you forgot to finish getting ready. Also, please recall that it was cold and windy, therefore, whatever makeup I had on was cried off.

SO.

I am not a natural beauty. It’s fine. I’m more concerned with being curious, kind, fricking hilarious, and/or not-so-vaguely terrifying. I mean, let’s not get carried away – I don’t want to be the model for a Netflix monster series as either monster or hero. Could I be cast in a Netflix monster series? Sure, probably as the neighbor who opens the door, says, “I heard screaming,” and then dies immediately in an unintentionally hilarious way.

ALSO, I take a certain pride in my lack of vanity, which is a sentence one says only if they are about to get humbled in a beauty store.

We encountered a gorgeous salesperson in her late-fifties, I would guess. She did the usual thing first and asked if we were aware of the sales. We were. Several times over. Then she looked at us and asked, “Are you related?”

Another sidenote, as long as we’re here: My kid and I look a lot alike, but I think about families who don’t and how that question might land.

“Yes.” I didn’t say more because I assumed that was the entire exchange. She stood there, visibly recalculating, starting and stopping her next sentence.

My brain caught up. Ohhh. She was trying to figure out if I was the mother or the grandmother.

Honestly, that’s fair. I had my daughter at what doctors call “advanced maternal age.” Not, like, “Weird Human-Interest-Story” advanced maternal age,” just regular “I Don’t Kneel On The Floor Without An Exit Plan” maternal age. It’s fine.

She continued stumbling.

“Oh, don’t worry, you look good.” (Mercifully, she did not add “for your age.”)

Reader, it’s entirely possible I’m not as lacking in vanity as I thought.

I don’t think she meant anything by it. Her mouth simply activated before the rest of her system had completed its startup sequence, which is a malfunction I also struggle with.

She is a midlife person surrounded by 20-somethings who can expertly wing their eyeliner in a hurricane using only one hand. She’s standing in a store that worships youth, and she’s trying not to step on a conversational landmine.

I liked her.

She asked us to let her know if we had any questions, and I asked her to point me to products that would make my hair look less like something that required filing an incident report. My daughter, once again victim of Mom Doing Bits In Public, went over to the Sol de Janeiro section for what I can only imagine was plausible deniability.

I purchased some sort of hair potion, then we left and got burgers. The man taking our order (age indeterminate) asked if we wanted fries.

THAT is the best question to ask me. No fishing required.

And you shouldn’t have to fish for your best question either, no matter your age, your face, or your current relationship status with moisturizer.

Wow. That’s preachy and doesn’t exactly make sense. Okay. Sorry. Let’s maybe end with the slightly less cringy “This was probably about understanding that we’re all just trying to get through the day without face-planting,” and then run credits.

Bonus post-credits scene: (*stares at camera*) Is anyone interested in doing a Netflix series called Gorgon! The Musical!?