jen larsen dot net
Currently viewing the category:
"a material world"
We talk a lot about how much we hate our stove. “I hate this stove,” I say. “This stove is awful,” E says. This stove is a relic, this stove is a piece of crap, this stove is one thousand years old and why, god, why have you cursed us with a stove [...]
The biggest, most gigantic thing in my life—literally, actually, if I pause a second to consider actual sizes—is the fact that we bought a house, Eben and I. We spent months and months looking at house after house—about 80 of them. And we spent months and months arguing and negotiating and complaining and being stressed [...]
Driving home from work tonight, I fell into a game of What If. That thing you do when you imagine that something catastrophic happens in your world that destroys everything, grinds your life right into the ground, and you have to restart entirely. Have to—it’s not your fault, because there was the Terrible Thing. It [...]
You know the three wishes game? Which is pretty much–that. You get three wishes. And you spend a lot of time crafting them carefully, wording them in very specific ways so that you are not screwed by a mischievous genie over a technicality because you had a dangling modifier or forgot to be precise in [...]
I have discovered the most amazing thing of all about living in the future, and it is that you can call up the nostalgic, rosy past whenever you like, with a click of your fingers and a credit card number. Did you know that onto the Nintendo Wii you can download the classics of [...]
They don’t tell you, in freelancing school, how great the potential for enormous amounts of guilt is, coming at you from all directions and every angle, pew pew pew. Maybe that’s because there is actually no Freelancing School. If there were, there ought be a class called Warmth vs. Freedom: The Pants/No-Pants Divide. Oh, and [...]
More or less officially, I am out of work. I had a contract job as a proofreader at an advertising agency; they wanted me full time, and to run the department. I said I can only do part-time! They took me on, anyway. When I didn’t change my mind about working for them full-time, they [...]
Because E is ridiculously awesome, but especially so at work, they rewarded him. I am as shocked as you are–an employer recognizing that an employee goes way above and far beyond? An employer who says holy crap, dude, your sense of responsibility and commitment and dedication is magnificent, is inspiring, is beautiful to behold and [...]
Sometimes I am taken up by such a tornado of amazement and wonder that I land three states away, blinking and with two broken legs and only one shoe. Probably because I have a gentle and completely credulous nature which makes me believe you when you say that it was you in the big dance [...]
The jeans in my drawers, all three pairs, all come from Old Navy. I have three pairs of jeans that are no longer my size set aside to give away, and they are all Old Navy jeans too. There is nothing wrong with Old Navy jeans, really–they are very inexpensive and come in an exciting [...]
subscribe, etc.
pretty as a picture
