A sleeping bag and maybe a towel⎯that’s all we used to need. Crashing at a friend’s place required no great forethought⎯a few days’ notice, maybe. But combine age, bigger incomes, more complicated lives, and greater needs for privacy and independence, and all of a sudden hospitality is a fraught issue. It’s Monday morning as I [...]
Author Archive
Grudges
Not the big hurts and betrayals that you grieve over, nurse for years, take to therapy. Not the stuff of broken hearts. Just the little insults that continue to gnaw at you, sometimes years later. Sure, it takes energy to sustain a grudge, and usually it’s easier just to let the offense fade into the [...]
Happiness is…
It’s a little bit like internet dating, nowadays: instead of going to the pound, you browse thumbnail photos online. Someone has written first-person blurbs that read like personal ads: “Hi! I’m two months old, with lots of energy. I like liver treats, tennis balls, and long walks in the park. How about you?!” Hundreds of [...]
My life on the C-list; or, The ones that got away
The first time, I am incredibly nervous. We exchange a polite email before I call to set up the appointment at her house. Driving into an unfamiliar neighborhood, cash bulging from my wallet, I wonder: what’s the etiquette? Do I ask her last name? Do I try to make small talk? How long should I [...]
Adventures in grading
“People with AIDS in the 1980s were considered by many to be leopards (in the Biblical sense).”
Closing time
(Part One here.) My friends, I have joined a secret society. It hides in plain sight. Some of you are members already. Some of you aspire to be. Others remain proudly free of the constant demands, financial obligations, and emotional binds the society exacts from its members. To the latter of you, I say: congratulations. [...]
Out like a…
By now you’ve likely noticed, been charmed by, and grown rather tired of this image: A WWII graphic that the English government’s Ministry of Information commissioned for use in the case of a Nazi occupation, the poster was set aside and virtually forgotten until it was rediscovered by a bookseller about ten years ago. He [...]
La maison, c’est moi
My family religiously observed the tradition of Sunday dinner (literally, since, as many readers know, family time is a Mormon fetish). Every other week we gathered for the whole evening⎯the grandparents, the siblings, and us, the first cousins. To say the teenaged me took these get-togethers for granted would be a huge understatement, but I [...]
Popular Songs (Yo La Tengo, Barrymore Theater, Madison, 1/23/10)
My car has a cassette deck but no CD player, so unless I plug the iPod adapter into the cigarette lighter, it’s college mix tapes all the way. Little time capsules that transport me back to the 1990s faster than clove cigarettes or sandalwood oil. They’re full of the usual suspects: Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Pixies. [...]
