Dear Darling Ones, When I say I am obsessed with the Sylvia Plath biography Red Comet I’m not using hyperbole for comic effect. This book is all I’ve done and thought about for at least a week. It’s been my constant companion. I read it while eating and drinking coffee and before zoom meetings and while I waited for dinner to cook and before going…
Hi Darling Ones, Sometimes a memory comes at you so fast and furious you have to blow off work to get it off your chest lest it fester all day. I saw a tweet a few minute ago where a woman talked about quitting her job, and it made me think about if I had ever quit a job, then the floodgates. . . In…
Dear Darling Ones, I am cranky and finding everything vaguely annoying. When I get overwhelmed about all the things I need to do for work or for continuing my existence I make a list. It helps soothes my anxiety and it makes all the things that loom so large in my head look a little less daunting. In attempt to stop being vaguely annoyed and…
Hi Darling Ones, I do not like the flower Bird of Paradise. In fact, I kinda hate it. Seeing one gives me hatey-feelings in my heart and makes me want to spit. I did not realize my distaste for this fart-face flower until I saw that LEGO is releasing a Bird of Paradise building kit. The strength of my reaction to this news surprised me…
Hey Darling Ones, Did you ever watch “The Good Place?” It’s a really good show about philosophy and the afterlife. If you’ve never seen it you should watch it now and thank me later*. There’s a great scene in the season two where the nerdy, super smart, and indecisive Chidi explains that his brain sounds like a garbage disposal with a fork stuck in it…
Hi Darling Ones, I got the yellow headphones and as I suspected they have fixed all the things. I’m unendingly content and frequently experience bursts of unmitigated joy. My loneliness has vanished along with my self-doubt, shame, and guilt. My hair is shinier. My muscles are stronger. I sleep the gentle slumber of the righteous and the just. My food tastes better, my plants are…
Dear Darling Ones, I went to Lutheran bible camp the summer I was fourteen or fifteen, which is exactly where you’d expect a Catholic girl to go to camp. This was the only time I ever went to camp, unless you count journalism camp or, I guess, marching band camp. Those last two things were just called camp but didn’t involve sleeping over anywhere. Bible…
Hey Darling Ones, It actively pisses me off that I love the song “Yellow*” by Coldplay. Just like “Creep” by Radiohead and “Crash Into Me” by the Dave Matthews Band. It would be much easier if I was apathetic to it like the rest of their music** and then could forever place them in the bucket labelled “shit I don’t care about.” Other things in…
Bleh, Darling Ones, I fell into a funk on Friday and I can’t seem to climb my way out of it. I don’t know if it’s 410 days of pandemic or the unending grey that is April in Minnesota or the weird mood swings that come with being a perimenopausal woman, but I am unhappy with notes of sad and lonely that provide a bitter…
Dear Darling Ones, I won’t go on and on about the conversation I witnessed between Karen Russell and Elizabeth McCracken. You kind of had to be there to accurately understand the magic. However there are three things I wanted to get out here for posterity. First, at the start of the conversation Karen Russell said, “I was just thinking about the Mad Libs grammar of…
