Tag Archives: personal essay

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?

Buckets, Knuckles, and Hex Codes

Humor, Inspiration, Life and Other Existential Problems, Month in Review, Parenting, Writing, , ,

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.

  • The “two inches that were actually six” of predicted snow on 12/7. Insert jokes as you wish.

Well, what do you want? A cookie? (I may have several hundred dozen.)

Enjoy your week and watch your knuckles. (Maybe a euphemism).