Category: Inspiration

Please Enjoy My 2026 Holiday Card

June 30, 2026June 30, 2026 · Leave a comment ·

Exactly on Time

Hello. It is June and this is my holiday card. Why? Because I did it last year and now I’m trapped by my own nonsense.

Besides, December is overloaded with holidays and various observances. It is the junk drawer of months. June has capacity for dumb stuff like this new tradition of mine.

Many traditions are just questionable decisions that gain momentum. This is how icebreakers, Elf on the Shelf, and Rob Schneider’s career got started.

Anyway. Greetings. Happy Asteroid Day, Outfit-of-the-Day Day, Frozen Yogurt Month, and Accordion Awareness Month however you celebrate.

(Is anyone unaware of accordions?)

Dearly Beloved,

We gather here today to squint at the smoldering crater where the first half of 2026 used to be and see if we can identify any remains.

Rest was once again on my 2026 to-do list. Are you familiar with Rest? People always recommend it. “Get some Rest,” as though Rest is something I should pick up next time I’m out running errands. Wonderful. Where is it? Is there a form? Does it come in bulk? Send me the link.

Thus far in 2026, I have acquired no new hobbies. I’d like to thank myself for that. I also did not renovate any part of my house, body, or mind. Nor did I write the Great American Novel (or the Terrible American Novel.) This is either existentialism or executive dysfunction.

Back in April, I accidentally did a squat.

Spring made a brief cameo appearance here in the Midwest before being escorted off the premises by eighty-seven consecutive weather emergencies. There were tornado warnings, air quality alerts, severe thunderstorms, tentative thunderstorms, and at least one day when outside felt like the inside of a crockpot. (Meteorologists are encouraged to fact-check me in their own annual holiday card, which I assume is called “Warm Fronts.” )

Yes, I consult the weather app frequently. I don’t know why. The weather app has never once improved the weather.

Unfortunately, the world is still producing horrific headlines at a rate normally associated with cocaine usage, and we’re still expected to keep up with household chores and careers and Duolingo and figuring out whether consciousness is emergent or fundamental.

Human beings were not designed for this. Human beings were designed to get excited when we spot a delicious non-lethal berry in the wild.

Still, we persist. Perhaps humanity’s greatest tradition is committing to ridiculous things.

From the Office of Glorious Offspring, my children continue their relentless campaign to grow up. I support this in theory, while also distinctly remembering teaching them things like “this is how to use a spoon” and “don’t lick shopping carts” and “that’s not how pants work.” It’s beautiful. I hate it. I am thrilled. I am devastated. I am proud. I am confused. I am excited. I am worried. These are not opposite things.

I am handling this magnificently, obviously.

The dog also persists. His monthly tradition is to shed enough fur to create an emergency backup dog. He is the household’s resident barbarian king, and we love him.

Clearly, love is just deciding that someone’s nonsense and fuzz is worth celebrating.

Surprisingly (and against mounting evidence) I continue to write. Writing is strange because much of it looks exactly like not writing. Then, somehow, words appear. Occasionally I gather with insanely talented and profoundly kind writers, which is fortunate because writers require regular contact with other writers. Left unattended, we wander into the woods and become lichen.

Writing is my nonsense and fuzz.

As is customary in holiday cards, I shall now announce resolutions that have absolutely no chance of surviving until Labor Day. There are but three:

Learn to distinguish between “This is interesting” and “I now own three turnip-specific kitchen gadgets.”
Avoid arguing with fools unless the audience is exceptional.
Be punctual with holiday-related blog posts. I’m already drafting my Arbor Day piece. The jokes do not write themselves.

Traditions are the nonsense we decide to keep. Some are inherited and some are accidental. Few make much sense and most make life better.

And so, I present to you THIS BERRY for your excitement …

…and some thematic music for the rest of your Asteroid Day.

May we continue to commit to the bit.

I Feel Bad About My [Waves Around Wildly]

February 3, 2026February 3, 2026 · 3 Comments ·

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 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

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

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

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?

Buckets, Knuckles, and Hex Codes

December 23, 2025December 22, 2025 · Leave a comment ·

December (Not Quite the End of the Month) Month-in-Review

It’s been a year since I’ve done a month-in-review post. I’m sure you are all very excited to have me draw back the curtain again. Well, joke’s on you. Behind this curtain is a trove of canned goods and a mysterious bucket no one remembers buying and no one is willing to throw away. “Never discard a mysterious bucket” might be some sort of unspoken family rule. THAT joke is on me.

After this reasonless hiatus, I’m resurrecting the month-in-review because sometimes it’s useful to return to a familiar container and rattle around inside it for a bit. Will the month-in-review posts continue in 2026? MAYBE.

Before any sticklers jump into my mentions without even offering me a cookie, I am well aware that the month is not over.

However, many of you mentally end the year sometime in mid-November, based on how many “Wrap-ups” and “I’m ready for 2026” comments are floating around out there. Look, you do you, friend. I was taught to run through the finish line.

But, sure, we can call this the “Not Quite the End of the Month Month-in-Review.” Not fussy at all.

ANYHOO, Happy Holidays. Let’s begin with an injury.

Earlier this month, I busted my knuckle open (not a euphemism). A few people noticed and asked how it happened. “Fighting crime,” which no one believed. Then I said the untrue but plausible, “I was just walking around.” Everyone believed that. Thanks, people who know me.

(Between you and me, I used a little extra oomph putting on a sweater and slammed my hand into the door jamb after successfully locating the arm hole.)

Please don’t be freaky and ask for photos of my (admittedly sexy) busted knuckle. It’s hard to photograph your own hand while recovering from ~~getting dressed all by myself~~ vigilantism.

There were wonderful parts of December, for sure, despite my ability to get hurt by doing nothing and also by doing things. (See: colliding with furniture in my own house, ambient exhaustion, December.)

One of my sons has begun making Jeopardy! games for the family. In the last five weeks, he has made three.

These are not casual games, nor intended to make us feel good about ourselves or our inability to quickly access our knowledge base. These are utterly lawless events fueled by a natural understanding of humor that routinely takes us out.

The categories alone injured me once because I rolled off the couch laughing. (Note to all of my ex-boyfriends: I still got it!)

We’ve had Prehistoric Fish, Former FBI Director James Comey, and Shades of Red (a block of color labeled with its hex code). This so thoroughly aggravated my husband that the next game had the category Tints of Red. In one game, he created a category called Who’s That?, which involved identifying people from photos. The first image was of Millard Fillmore. The second was Dilbert. Two questions later: the same picture of Dilbert.

We considered ourselves lucky that the Dilbert questions were straightforward. Half the fun this kid has is in figuring out the most obtuse ways a question can relate to the category. And I will add that at least once each game is a question that simply says, “Touch the dog.” Which, yes, that is not a question, but we all run to Buddy like maniacs. He likes it. It’s got this vibe.

For my birthday, he shamelessly calibrated the game to some of my alleged areas of expertise, including Kurt Vonnegut, the family dog, Danish Butter Cookie Tins, as well as an entire category based on photographs of his school lunches.

Somehow, I lost.

Somehow, my husband won with a final score of –2400.

This game has it all: Intellectual chaos, hostile specificity, everyone yelling “WHAT IS GOING ON?” while the dog enjoys his celebrity and hopes Final Jeopardy is “Belly Rubs.” (It is not.)

So December has been largely survived up until this moment, and my knuckle is healing.

Does anyone know what that bucket is for?

Until we all figure it out, here are some

Splashes of Marvelous from December 2025:

Fellow Snarkians, I had no idea this was still a thing. I am delighted to be wrong. Entire stretches of my childhood were spent drooling over these guys.
If you ever have a chance to go see/hear the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus, do it! I went to the Holly Dolly Christmas show and remained in an excellent mood for 2-3 business weeks.
It might technically be too late to prep for Jolabokaflod, but every day can be Jolabokaflod if your heart is pure. Or you feel like it. I’m making the rules now. If you need some ideas, I’ve got you.
Related, I would like to formally propose an evening where we gather around a fireplace, eat treats, and read. Silently. Shhhh. Let’s make this introverted bibliophile’s dream a reality. And if you talk, I’m cramming one of these in your mouth, and not gently.
This is the only type of “conversation piece” I’d ever want to wear.
The Best Simple Stuffing Recipe | Bon Appétit Trust me.
I baked three dozen cookies for school, another 900 dozen (give or take) for home. Emergency preparedness is important. This is why I have a small bag of sprinkles in my purse at all times. (True!)

After I sent those cookies off to school with my boys, one of them came home and brought me…a cookie. Not one I made, but a snickerdoodle. And before you have a problem with that, NO YOU DON’T.