This post originally appeared November 28, 2016. I have a tendency to worry. When I’m stressed, I can worry pretty much any time of day, but my brain’s favorite time to worry is in the middle of the night. At 3 a.m., there is no problem that can’t be mulled over, chewed on, and puffed […]
Art
When the old mammal hall closed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, it was the end of an era at the museum. The museum’s mammal dioramas were of the old school, displaying the stuffed mammals in their environments. They were in a dark, low-ceilinged part of the museum, and I almost always walked […]
The marmoset looked unlikely on the filing cabinet. It reclined on a piece of poster board, its skinny arms folded across its chest. Its cotton-stuffed eyes stared at the low, tiled ceiling. The specimen room smelled strongly of tea and cornmeal. Carina pulled the handle of a taller cabinet, and Mo and I leaned in. […]
Cameron: Helen! It is I, the high school state debate champion of 2009, here to have another vicious argument with you. Although there are many things about that sentence that are not true, and even grammatically incorrect. Helen: Oooooh this is exciting. And slightly scary.
This post originally appeared on April 7, 2017. It’s always a good time to talk about whales and Peeps dioramas. I have a bit of a thing about whales. The shelf above my desk at home is full of whale art, and a National Geographic whale poster hangs in a frame above that. Along with […]
At last, it is here. February 14th: Your favorite party for beheaded Christian martyrs. And your opportunity to tell that special someone just how much you care. So what are you to do now that those gum-lacerating conversation hearts are no more? Or when the greeting cards on offer just involve too many soft kittens […]
I had some trouble with the state of the world in 2018. As a result, I’ve been having trouble figuring out what to write for this blog. (I wrote about this problem in October.) Christie suggested “beginnings” as a topic for today’s blog post, and I noodled around a while on that. But when I […]