0 comments

five good things

1. Last week I thought to myself, self, I wonder what would happen if every time I was sitting at my desk and reflexively clicked over to twitter, I did NOT click over to twitter and read a few pages of a book on the Kindle Cloud Reader instead? THE ANSWER: four books in ten days and a marked decrease in anxiety and teeth-gnashing. Imagine that. I have more to say about this but for now I am just really liking it. Making different choices! Emotional health!

2. Americanah, which was hilarious and heartbreaking and so incisive and just generally perfect in its detail, plus the romance is top notch which as you know is a thing I enjoy.

3. Have I talked about Quantico here yet? Quantico! The hot guy on Quantico! The makeouts on Quantico! The intrigue on Quantico! The ladies on Quantico! Everyone please watch Quantico so it doesn’t get cancelled!

4. Boston Area folks! Corey Ann Haydu’s fabulous play OCD LOVE STORY is up at Noble & Greenough School this weekend. I cannot get over how cool I think this is. I think it is very cool.

5. IT IS HALLOWEEN which means it is time for my annual viewing of many classic films including, obviously, Practical Magic and Hocus Pocus and MOST IMPORTANTLY: Teen Witch. There is no way for me to overstate how formative this movie was for me, you guys. I, too, want to be the most popular girl.  Top that.

0 comments

five good things

1.  I saw Hanson last weekend! They were nerdy and great. When Taylor came onstage I heard myself say, “Hi, idiot,” really softly without even meaning to and it made me feel very happy and like I was home.

2. The Bullet Journal, which obviously I was always going to love. I can’t believe it took me this long to figure it out. I don’t know if it’s actually making me more productive or it just feels that way, but it kind of doesn’t matter.

3. Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which is maybe my favorite book I’ve read all year. I cried all the way through the last fifty pages.

4. It felt like I was about to fly off the face of the planet so on Sunday I did a hard reset, cleared my calendar and put on my fitbit, made rules for bedtime and getting up and planned all my dinners through the week. A couple of weeks ago in Austin I had brunch with a friend who is also a therapist and she said, “When you feel overwhelmed the first thing you stop doing is the stuff you need to do to not be overwhelmed, and it’s important not to let go of those things.” I thought that was very good and very obvious/not-obvious advice.

5. MOST IMPORTANTLY OH MY GOD: I finally bought kitchen chairs like a damn adult.

 

PS: are you hanging out with me on tumblr? Tumblr is like all good things all the time.

0 comments

five good things

1. Hamilton, obviously. I mean. Obviously.

2. Listening to Hozier’s Like Real People Do under the blood moon at Boston Calling last weekend (and also seeing real girls walking around in actual flower crowns? I DID NOT KNOW THIS WAS A THING NOT ON THE INTERNET, it was ridiculous and sublime, also I am one thousand years old. Young people! Tell me your customs!).

3. I had a big project to finish this week which meant working every night while my husband gamely brought me snacks and water and kept me company while watching a whole season of Ray Donovan (or, as I like to call it, Boston McIrish), the dopiest gangster show on TV. This show is not good, you should not watch it, but every once in awhile someone says something hilarious and awful in a terrible Southie accent (“He has Pahkinson’s, ya c*nt!”) and I was in exactly the right headspace for that to be the kind of thing I really enjoyed. Thank you, Boston McIrish!

4. This Eater profile of Ina, which is wonderful and a little deranged in tone (DARE I SAY, JUST LIKE INA HERSELF).

5. It’s decorative gourd season, motherfuckers. Am headed out of town for the weekend to pick some apples and eat some donuts and drink large quantities of Octoberfest like god intended. Happy fall.

, 0 comments

bad robot

(FYI: this post is full of spoilers for Mr. Robot, the biggest of which is: Mr. Robot made me really mad!)

 

Last week I started watching Mr. Robot, and for the first few episodes I really liked it. I liked how weird and stylized it was. I liked that the main character, Elliot, had social anxiety but a good sense of humor; I liked the twistiness of the plot and the way I wasn’t entirely sure if the narration was reliable or it wasn’t. I liked the cute dog. And I liked it because frankly it’s rare that my husband and I can find something to watch together where one of us doesn’t feel bored or vaguely insulted at some point in the first half hour. For a couple of days there it seemed like maybe Mr. Robot was going to be that kind of show that both of us could be really into.

Guess what! It wasn’t!

Pretty soon, there were a couple of things that started bothering me. The first was the weird Madonna/whore thing the writers set up to contrast Elliot’s childhood pal Angela with his drug dealer and friend-with-benefits, Shayla. Angela is blonde and perky looking. She dresses in collared shirts; she has a steady boyfriend and a corporate job. Shayla…wears a lot of eye makeup, is friendly but stupid, and has sex with Elliot even though he’s categorically not very nice to her? She sews artistic pillows, though, which made me think the writers were at least trying to do something with her, so I did what I do a lot when I’m watching TV and I shrugged off the laziness of the trope.

A thing that was harder to shrug off, though, was the bit of casual rape they threw in there For Grittiness. A couple of episodes in, Shayla’s supplier (whose name I don’t remember and can’t be bothered to Google, so let’s just call him Bad Guy) drugs and rapes her, then deposits her in a bathtub for Elliot to come rescue after a tense standoff. Elliot’s understandably alarmed, but Shayla insists she’s totally fine, so it’s never mentioned again. In fact, Elliot’s voiceover tells us explicitly what we’re meant to take away from the episode: that Bad Guy is escalating in his Bad Behavior. What happened to Shayla isn’t actually about Shayla at all.

My feelings about Casual Rape on Television For Grittiness are well-documented and could be a whole other blog post, so I won’t go into them too much here (except no, I HATE CASUAL RAPE ON TELEVISION FOR GRITTINESS; in addition to all the obvious reasons for hating it, such as being a human woman, I think that nearly all of the time it is lazy, lazy writing). Suffice it to say, the whole thing really bummed me out, but even then I was willing to keep going because I liked the other parts of the show, I wanted to see what happened next, and, maybe most importantly: being a lady who loves television often means accepting the fact that even really, really good shows are going to let you down from time to time when it comes to the way they treat people like you. If I stopped watching a show every time it made my face do a weird thing, I would have nothing left to watch (except the first season of Friday Night Lights, obviously; the first season of Friday Night Lights is perfect and if you can think of a reason why it’s not I don’t want to hear about it). Nah, it’s okay, I said to my husband. Let’s watch another one.

And then, at the end of Episode 5, Shayla turned up dead and mutilated in the trunk of a car.

Now, look. I feel like it’s worth noting here that I make stories for a living. I understand how they are structured. I can imagine what the conversation must have been like in that writers’ room: Guys, we’re halfway through the season! We need to raise the stakes and change expectations and give Elliot something to fight for and BLAH BLAH BLAH GUESS WHAT I DO NOT CARE, BYE FOREVER, I’M OUT.

I’m tired of bad things happening to women to motivate men to greatness. I’m tired of looking at pretty girls covered in blood. And I’m mad and embarrassed that I waved off the other parts of the show that bothered me, the parts that set Shayla up as less-than and disposable to begin with, as if those parts were somehow less egregious than what came next.

My feminism is not particularly academic. I don’t always have the right vocabulary for explaining why things upset me. But a thing I do know, and which I said on Twitter the other night, is that my standards are very low. Please no mutilated girls in your trunk, is my standard. Please no mutilated girls in your freezer, or your storage unit, or your basement.

Apparently, that is asking too much.

I read somewhere that if anyone actually puts you in the trunk of their car, you’re supposed to kick the taillight out from the inside and wave your hand until someone sees you. This is a weird, gross, horrifying fact to find useful, but because of the world we live in I do find it kind of useful, and I found myself wishing that I knew a similar tip for making that kind of thing disappear from TV.

For now, what I could do was change the channel. So I did.

0 comments

five good things

1. Yesterday on twitter I was complaining about how I missed Serial and BOOM, two hours later the universe dropped Limetown in my lap. There are only two episodes so far, but HOLY MOSES they are weird and chilling and great. Manifesting works, the Secret is real, put your needs out into the universe, etc etc.

2. House things: a jewel of a downstairs bathroom that is juuust about finished, the end of the tomato plants, wooden blinds and a plan to host Thanksgiving, assuming I have chairs by then. I have my eye on a bar for the living room. Come over and I’ll fix you a drink.

3. Mr. Robot, which I just started and which I am really liking so far, even if I do find that kid kind of alarming to look at.

4. I think I’ve talked about this before, but over the last year or so Boston’s South Station has made a real effort to be an actual functioning train station in an actual major city instead of a steaming pile of pee-smelling garbage with an Au Bon Pain in the middle of it, and as somebody who is perpetually schlepping up and down the Northeast Corridor, it is a thing I really appreciate.

5. Speaking of which: am heading to New York this weekend for a combination of work and play and baby-holding. I’m going to eat ginger molasses cookies and buy fancy soaps.

0 comments

out of the ocean

IMG_1395

In Sligo A wants to go to for a seaweed soak, so we walk along the rainy shoreline until we reach a big old bathhouse built into the side of a cliff. It’s very relaxing, she tells me, and though I am frankly rather dubious regarding any new experience that purports to chill me out–I once had an anxiety attack during a massage at the Bliss in the W Hotel like only a true winner can–the boys are golfing and we’re not due in Dublin ’til dinner and we are On Vacation and so I say, sure! 

It isn’t a spa, A warns me, like there’s something she isn’t saying.

Sounds awesome, I tell her, and nod.

I don’t know exactly what I’m picturing but what we get is literal bathrooms, old-fashioned tubs full of murky brown water and a scrum of seaweed floating on the bottom. Right away I feel my heart start to pound. The house looks like something out of Downton Abbey and woman who runs it is lovely, from a storybook right down to her fisherman’s sweater, but as soon as we walk through the door I know there is no way this is going to end in anything but tears and possibly an inoperable skin condition. Still, I have paid my 25 Euro so I listen gamely as she explains how to work the steam box, a medieval-looking contraption that turns on with a deafening whoosh that rattles the hundred-year old pipes. “You’ve got the whole hour,” the woman tells me cheerfully. “Just dump the seaweed in the bucket when you’re done.”

When she’s finished her instructions I lock the door behind her. I peel off my jeans and my boots. I curl my fingers around the side of the tub, dip my toe into the water, then let out a yelp as my bare feet slip out from under me and I come within an inch of cracking my skull open all over the tiled floor.

I take a deep breath and try again, muttering a variation of the same thing I’ve been telling myself for three decades now: relax, motherfucker. I lower carefully myself into the water. I spring right out again like it’s infested with sharks. I towel off, shivering, and fish my phone out of my purse: exactly eleven minutes have elapsed.

I get dressed, sit on the windowsill, pull my book out, and settle in.

Relaxation, after all, comes in many forms.

 

 

 

 

, 0 comments

five good things

1. Eight incredibly wonderful days in Europe, an Irish wedding and beers with a second cousin at a pub hidden behind a hardware store, walking down the street in Rome and stopping at every storefront advertising pizza, holding hands in front of the Eiffel Tower like a couple of turds, singing Bon Jovi at a bar with old friends, a truffle tasting, green hills and tall buildings, legs that ached from walking at the end of every day.

2. Curling up in the dark under my blanket scarf and watching five different movies on the flight home yesterday, even though none of them were actually very good. I never watch that many movies! It felt kind of decadent, or as decadent as one can possibly be while sitting in Seat 24F of a US Airways flight and hoping one doesn’t die of a blood clot.

3. Landing at Logan and ordering Chinese delivery from the cab, because of freedom.

4. It’s September! I love September, it’s my favorite, it feels like the real beginning of the year to me, and I’m looking forward to a more regular schedule and being present in this space a bit more.

5. To celebrate: have a giveaway! I’ve got a signed copy of 99 DAYS + a copy of NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR JULIE MURPHY(!!!!)’S DUMPLIN’ to one lucky US/Canada resident. To enter, leave a comment below with your email address! I’ll notify a winner on Monday.

0 comments

cool for the summer

playing skee ball at the arcade in Westchester with my husband and brothers-in-law, hitting the jackpot and giving our tickets away to a bunch of little kids * sitting at John Dory’s with L, the bartender fixing us a drink called a troublemaker * Unreal * playing cards at a picnic table with J and S and how much I laughed that whole weekend, in a way I only ever laugh when I am with them * Outlander * that first red tomato on my tomato plant *  watching the bats swoop around the yard at J’s boyfriend P’s house* drinking wine with M in the lobby of the hotel in Manila * getting off that plane and being home * #KCreadsHP * a tour of the Harper offices with the one and only AB * the Arboretum * a hundred naps * finishing my revision * two Old Navy jumpsuits I honestly just wore the shit out of * the glass roof at the Harvard Art Museum * the Lawn on D * cuddling one BLV, my favorite baby of all the babies * drinks in NYC with CAH, who is really just the most lovely * Cheerleader, which I personally choose to read as an ode to female friendship and not whatever gross thing other people keep trying to tell me it is * finishing grad school, finally * the photo booth at Coney Island* one new bathroom in one old house * a Father’s Day visit from my dad * sitting in the yard, people coming and going, snacks on the table and drinks in the fridge * All of it, really. All of it. This summer was tops.

0 comments

five good things

1. I wanted to do August on purpose as much as I possibly could and I feel good about how it happened, trips to New York and wine tastings and playing with a baby and sitting on the beach and in front of a fire. I ate grilled corn and got a lot of mosquito bites and left work early to go drink summer beer. It’s cooler in the mornings now, and I feel like that’s okay, like I’m ready. There’s a flip flop tan on my feet.

2. Outlander, which I thought for some reason was not my bag and which I wound up LIKING SO MUCH OH MY GOD, I just ordered the second one from the library and cannot get it in my eyeballs soon enough. I have so many thoughts about this book! Mostly I have so many thoughts about Jamie Fraser! The lesson of reading this summer is that I actually like a lot of things I thought I didn’t. That’s a good lesson to learn.

3. Handing in a revision and turning my attention to something new, that moment when everything is possible. I just want to read and listen to music and make things up.

4. Show Me a Hero, on which I am behind but that guy is really handsome and the writing is really smart, and also I just like listening to all of them say Yonkers over and over because I am a dirty Westchester kid in my heart.

5. I leave for Europe next Wednesday! What!

Happy Friday. Happy end of summer. Happy everything.

 

0 comments

five good things

1. I’m at the place finally in this revision where it’s starting to actually feel like a book to me, where I’m reading through and able to get my arms around it, to find the loose threads and pull them without worrying I’m going to unravel the whole thing and strangle myself. I’ll probably feel differently in five minutes, but for right now: it’s nice.

2. The three construction workers who eat their breakfast every morning outside the Dunkin’ Donuts on Broadway and use the Herald dispenser as a table like they’re at the world’s Southiest tea party.

3. August makes summer feel urgent; am eating as many tomatoes as humanly possible and seeing as many people I love as I can. Tonight I’m having margaritas with my best friend from high school. Tomorrow I’m meeting my sister at the beach.

4. The natural light in the new Harvard Art Museum, which I actually kind of liked more than the art itself.

5. This morning I heard Carly Simon on NPR, which made me think of my dad. I grew up in a Carly Simon house. I grew up in a Joni Mitchell house, too, and a classical music house, with parents who wanted us to hear things whether we particularly liked them or not. Last night at eleven-thirty my mom texted, half-frantic: do you remember when we took you to the Italian children’s opera with the puppets?

Yes, I promised. I remember. 

«< 4 5 6 7 8 >»