Fresh out of college, you take a job as a nanny in a foreign country, so you can learn the language while making a little money. You’re living with an American family at the U.S. embassy, taking care of their one-year-old daughter. You spend your free time roaming the streets of the exotic capital city [...]
Archive for the ‘Health’ category
How to have heart surgery
My dad just had open-heart surgery to replace a poorly functioning valve. He never had any kind of cardiac “event,” just discovered the problem during checkups and follow-up visits to the doctor. This kind of surgery — valve replacement — is deemed “routine,” even though they crack your chest open. There has been nothing routine [...]
Her best client
I have a crush on my physical therapist. She is all Charlize-Meg-Reese perky with blond curly hair and eyes the color of her pale blue sweater. She is like a favorite second grade teacher who always knew what to say and when to say it and we all vied for front row seats in her classroom. She [...]
I hereby resolve
Resolved: To take a multivitamin every day, rather than buying those big bottles of them and forgetting to take them until they’re out of date. Resolved: To get Lasik. Someday. Resolved: To play my guitar more before the dust swallows it completely and it’s just a giant faux termite hill in the corner of my [...]
To Live and Ride in LA
Los Angeles is known as a city of millions of cars. Things are just too far apart, and public transportation just too slow and sparse, to make it easy *not* to own one. Houston, apparently, has the most cars per household in the country, but we’ve got the worst traffic-related congestion and pollution. Debates are [...]
Help
I was all set to write my blog about something else, when I ended up spending 90 minutes on the phone with a friend who is breaking down mentally, emotionally and physically. This is not the first time you have heard of this friend. So, it’s making me think about how we help each other, [...]
On Sickness and in Health
I’m writing this in a waiting room at Georgetown University hospital, where a friend is having an MRI. She’s been healthy her whole life, but in the past couple of months has endured a whole catalogue of physical and emotional ills — stomach pain, severe indigestion, back pain, anxiety, insomnia. This morning, she said to [...]
I am, as it turns out, quite clean.
The past few months since I quit writing my blog, Is there no sin in it?, I’ve felt a little unmoored. I keep telling myself it’s a good thing, not blogging, not sharing every thought I have with a thousand strangers a day. I had started to feel like I couldn’t have an experience without [...]
Gardening in the desert, late-summer 2007 edition
As a child, I hated working in the garden. Gardening in those days meant pulling up weeds and chucking rocks from my parents’ ever-increasing vegetable patch in the back yard of our home, which was situated on a bench at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains in northern Utah. This bench had long ago been [...]
Three, four, knock at the door
I’m one of those liberals who likes to reject criminal stereotypes. Although I present as a prissy white middle class woman who might be obsessed by the murder of Laci Peterson while ignoring the thousands of women of color who are victims of crime, I’m not. I hate that Nancy Grace-style racism and I’ve always [...]
