All posts by Jackie Pick

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About Jackie Pick

Jackie Pick is a former teacher and current writer living in the Chicago area. She is a contributing author to multiple anthologies, including Multiples Illuminated, So Glad They Told Me: Women Get Real about Motherhood, Here in the Middle, as well as the and the literary magazines The Sun and Selfish. She received Honorable Mention from the Mark Twain House and Museum for her entry in the Royal Nonesuch Humor Writing Competition. Jackie is a contributing writer at Humor Outcasts, and her essays have been featured on various online sites including McSweeney's, Belladonna Comedy, Mamalode, The HerStories Project, and Scary Mommy. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, Jackie is co-creator and co-writer of the award-winning short film Fixed Up, and a proud member of the 2017 Chicago cast of Listen To Your Mother.

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!?

Auld Lang Sigh

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, Under 750, ,

I, Too, Have New Year’s Thoughts

EEveryone else seems to know how to do this.

Pop Quiz! In the above sentence, “this” refers to:

a) Navigating a Trader Joe’s parking lot without emotional or vehicular damage.

b) Leaving a voicemail (!) without a panic outro.

c) Loading the dishwasher without it provoking a weird fork argument with your spouse.

d) The New Year’s ritual of declaring goals, intentions, and a revised version of yourself.

The answer is D.

(Technically, “All of the above” applies to me, although for the record, I recently exited a TJ’s parking lot and only two people flipped me off. I also tumbled headfirst into a grocery cart corral, if you’d like a fun visual. But I digress.)

New Year’s goals are an annual ritual for deciding who we will become next. Broadly speaking, the available options appear to be: Do more of something. Do less of something. Be more yourself. Be less of whoever you’ve been.

I am not by nature a Grand Goals Person. I am a “Could These Goals Be Administered In A Single Daily Capsule?” Person. What I’m trying to say is that I’m in a stage of life where I forget that I set goals at all, never mind following through on the “actionable steps” required to achieve them. January rolls in, and I’m already behind on being aspirational and/or functional.

Predictably, I once again started January on decidedly WTF footing. I, too, want more and better (or less and better), and yes, Random Enthusiastic Person On The Internet, I understand that only I can make that happen.

Most New Year’s resolution advice assumes you have quiet to reflect, sufficient attention to make good (enough) choices, and enough solid ground to stand on while doing all that.

I am not on solid ground. I’m dog paddling through whatever swamp-adjacent mucky fuckery all this is. As such, I’m not doing anything other than scanning my surroundings and wondering how long we all can keep this up before stress-testing floating debris to see if we can comfortably nap on it.

Many of us are operating with severely depleted attention, and we’re absolutely fried due to what feels like oversubscription to the world. When attention thins, decision-making degrades.

Last year, I said I wanted to pay attention to where my attention was going – real genius stuff until I tried and immediately forgot what I was doing. Attention is what allows you to evaluate options well, and without it, every choice feels loud and wrong. I hate loud. I hate wrong. I especially hate loud and wrong.

This unsettled, flayed feeling is apparently the emotional launchpad for Grand Goals Setting.

But, I DID set goals.

Last year.

Just for posterity, here they are:

  • Let my inner weirdo become my outer weirdo.
  • Find more wonderlands: big cushions, warm chairs, fireplaces, and someone patting the seat next to them like, “Come. Sit. Stay a while.”
  • Work the phrase “everything went tits up” into more conversations.
  • Be like my dog: long walks, bursts of speed toward nothing, naps in the sun, and flappies (scientific term) to clear my head.
  • Read more. Write more. Read better. Write better.
  • I used to tell stories here. Real ones. Small ones. Messy, absurd ones. Somewhere along the way, I got stuck in broad magician-off-the-Strip tellings. No more. Back to real ones, with all the tits-up moments.
  • Schedule my damn flu shot.
  • Play.

I am not going to tell you which of these I accomplished.

Ok, yes, I will. I got my flu shot.

So for the sake of rest and attention, I will recycle that list.

This space, whatever it is, remains open for oddness and wonderlands. And for madly gripping joy, especially because it may be a floating debris pile to nap on to take a break from all the mad dog paddling.

And if things go tits up as we tumble into our grocery cart corrals in the Trader Joe’s parking lot – well, maybe we can figure out how to use them as flotation devices.

Girl Bosses Tilt at Windmills (Or Do They?)

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

What I Read December 2025

I read three books this month. “Only” three, because the page count of one of the books triumphed over my ambition to get cozy and read anywhere between 5 and 43 books. Look, as you already know if you’ve ever wandered even accidentally into my writing, I am extremely busy. Doing what, you ask? Fretting about how busy I am, which is its own full-time job. It’s exhausting and inefficient, but it’s a living. Now, please mind your business (after you finish this piece, thanks.)

One of these books was Don Quixote. A famously long book (900+ pages! In a row!) about a person who reads too much and begins to confuse stories with reality. Any of you who are heavy readers probably relate.

My second read was Cultish, which is about how language creates meaning, belonging, and identity, and how quickly those things can curdle into manipulation.

The third was First Person Singular, a collection of stories in which Haruki Murakami does his thing. Things happen, or don’t. Or maybe they do, but in some weird emotional vapor. The narrators themselves often seem unsure what, if anything, just occurred. Then, more often than not, they decide that if an event did have meaning, it probably wasn’t consequential. And then The End. Sir? Excuse me? And also, this feeling I have at the end of each story isn’t necessarily unpleasant. Whyyyyy?

In all three, things happen, and they happen with juice. Not literal juice, in case any of you folks are in a “well, actually,” mood, although if you’re talking about cults, Kool-Aid will eventually burst in via a non-load-bearing wall.

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

  • Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (Translated by Edith Grossman)
  • Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
  • First Person Singular: Stories by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel

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

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (Translated by Edith Grossman)

Oh sure, let me just take on a 900-page canonical, picaresque novel. That’s a reasonable response to insomnia, especially given what all that reading famously does to Don Quixote himself.

Uh oh.

Still. I did it. One must have standards, even while abandoning common sense. I promised myself I would watch Man of La Mancha once I finished, a show I have somehow avoided my entire life, despite being the kind of person who should have already seen it.

Also, I get to use the word picaresque. And now you do, too. Congratulations.

(continued here)

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

Janice from your high school PE class has emailed you. She’s very excited. She wants you to join something, you girlboss, you. Details about that something are murky, but it will change your life. Act fast.

If your gut reaction to this is “ew” and that “ew” is unrelated to Janice serving a volleyball directly into your face during the volleyball unit, you may have good reason.

(continued here)

First Person Singular: Stories by Haruki Murakami (Translated by Philip Gabriel)

Recently, I chatted with someone I’d done a show with years ago, and we started talking about rehearsals. At some point I said, “Remember when I got yelled at for moving the chair?”

He did not remember this.

I remembered it very clearly. During a tech rehearsal, I’d moved a chair while trying to clear the stage between scenes because the person assigned to move it hadn’t done it. The director growled, “DON’T MOVE SET PIECES THAT YOU’RE NOT ASSIGNED TO.” It was mortifying. I don’t like being yelled at, even if I have committed some kind of theatrical felony. I may have cried a little backstage, facing a corner and pretending I was absolutely not crying and just liked looking at walls.

According to everyone else, though, this never happened. Or if it did, it was no big deal. No one remembered the chair. Or the yelling. Or my belief that I had ruined everything.

I did not enjoy realizing that a moment so clearly part of my theater experience seemed not to exist anywhere else at all.

Which brings us to First Person Singular.

(continued here)

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