Tag Archives: personal essay

In Attendance

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

Also, a Coat

The coat is brown, puffy, and goes to my ankles. Add a messy bun and I look like the poo emoji.

I needed the coat a few weeks ago because it was freezing and my daughter had a regional middle school choir concert at a high school gym.

Middle school choir concerts are my favorite form of civic optimism. Kids collaborate to make something beautiful despite puberty actively sabotaging their vocal cords, all so an audience can briefly believe we belong to one another. This is where hope lives, even if the venue smells like feet.

Parental love has historically forced humanity into far worse circumstances than this, even on a cold Thursday evening.

So into the coat I went, looking and feeling like a baked potato.

My husband, daughter, and I arrived at the high school to find the gym entrance guarded by a teenage usher who held back the restless audience with all the authority of a traffic cone. The kids went to warm up while families packed the lobby. Everyone talked about how busy and tired they were. The tiredest people who have ever busied. As if to illustrate the point, an exhausted toddler lay starfished on the floor, wailing in the Hall of Interminable Waiting.

Five minutes before the show, the poor usher stepped aside and the crowd surged. Someone behind me decided I was an obstacle to their getting exactly as bad a seat as everyone else, and they shoved me. Mercifully my enormous coat absorbed the blow.

Anyway, we easily found seats, as did literally everyone else. My coat’s protective puffiness had been deployed for naught.

A few parents from our kid’s school came over to chat (“Hi! How are you?” “Tired and busy.” “Same.”) and then disappeared into bleachers on one of the three designated walls.

I folded my coat behind me, exhaled, and assumed that for the rest of the evening, the worst thing that could happen was that 50-100% of my butt cheeks might fall asleep.

Along the fourth wall were the rows of choir kids in school shirts and venue-appropriate shoes, clutching folders and ready to be taken seriously while delighting us.

The program started. The choirs took us on a world tour: “Tottoyo” from the Caribbean. The Russian folk song “Kalinka.” An arrangement of “Dies Irae” to liven up the joint.

When not singing, the kids sat attentive and appreciative of the other groups.

And for three glorious minutes, I thought maybe humanity has a chance.

However, another performance unfolded behind us, where a delegation of moms and dads sat. No idea who they were, but they clearly knew each other well enough to narrate the entire concert. Before, after, and during the songs. They declared “winners,” opined on which song “lost them,” and critiqued soloists. They laughed out of delight, but sometimes they laughed in that other way, too. One mom casually sang along to the songs she knew, and she knew quite a few of them. Then she complained about the audience’s bad etiquette when they clapped for soloists in the middle of a piece.

(Reminder: the universe will always choose to deploy irony in a high school gym.)

The singers were too far away to hear the chatter. My husband and I were too close not to.

But no one else seemed bothered – except possibly the person on the other side of my husband, who sat up straighter and straighter as the evening wore on, like her sense of decency was trying to escape through the top of her head before she did something regrettable.

Maybe the talking was the kind of thing you’re supposed to let slide. I reminded myself that no one had crowned me Queen of the Gym Bleachers, Sovereign of Decorum.

My shoulders crept toward my ears with familiar fury. Oh, hello, lifelong training to quell my irritation rather than risk being socially punished for noticing poor behavior.

I tried to listen to the kids, but the conversations behind me kept pulling my focus.

And then, my notably easygoing and also deaf in one ear husband shushed them.

He shushed them. Again and again.

I mean, they ignored him, BUT STILL.

After the final song, my husband and I performed a traditional Midwestern Passive Aggressive Two-Step.

1. Stare down Sing-Along Mom and her friends and say, “These kids deserved a better audience.”

2. Flee.

We found our daughter near the doors, eager to tell us all the behind-the-scenes details.

I nodded along, overheating in my coat, listening to her version of the night where everyone made space for one another.

We told her we were glad we were there.

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?