My mother, in her housecoat on a Sunday. She is trying to quit smoking. She tears open a package of plain M&Ms and pours them into her pocket, and it’s an ingenious idea. Candy on your person, for any kind of emergency that occurs—nicotine craving or chocolate urge, need for candy or [...]
Wow, what has it been, four years since the last leap? What have you done for the past four years? What are you going to do with the next four years? And what are you going to do with this extra day we have had handed to us? An extra day inserted [...]
My brother and his wife are world travelers. They went to Thailand on their honeymoon, have been to Istanbul and Mexico and South America and all over Europe, and Carrie even spent a month in Africa. The two of them, they love to travel, and they have beautiful photos to show when [...]
Right now, I’m broke. Brokety-broke. Broke-diggity. I mean like, dust in my bank account, holy shit how am I going to pay my half of the mortgage kind of broke.
It’s my own fault—obviously the money fairies didn’t come nibble away at the pile of coins that used to glimmer so charmingly [...]
My very first tattoo was a lie.
When you lie, you are reshaping the world in the image that burns bright in your head. And the version of yourself that you present is so much better than the Universe’s version. In the Universe’s version, you are not nearly as interesting as you [...]
It was the Valentine’s Day directly after I broke up with my long-term boyfriend, just two months after we had ended it. Actually, he broke up with me. At Christmas. But that summer I had moved all the way to San Francisco to get away from him, so I suppose it was [...]
So Stephenie Meyer, she had a dream about a sparkly vampire lying in a field with her, and there was some love and shit, and she wrote it all down. Then, something about her vision, her deeply troubling psychological issues that she left heaving and bloody all over the page, it struck people with [...]
Every day I look at the class schedule at my gym—my gym, I say, as if I have some kind of claim on it, having been there so often and really marking it with my sweat glands—and I fantasize about what it would be like to go to a class. A class! Me in [...]
Okay. So first, you taper the dose of Effexor you’re taking. You do this slowly, because there are physical side effects that occur, among them the “brain zap,” as it’s called. Jennette has a very good explanation of why that is here.
You begin to experience the withdrawal effects, but you’re also [...]
It was when I was thrift store shopping that I remembered that one of the things I want to do when I get a wheelbarrow full of money, besides purchase a nuclear-powered stove and get my name etched on the surface of the moon, was get a tummy tuck. Flat-out, straight-up plastic surgery.
I [...]
