It is me again, with my hopeful calendars! I originally wrote this post in January 2020, when the calendar did seem like a place where you could write something on a certain date and there would be a reasonable chance that it would come to pass. I feel much more timid now, three years on. […]
Miscellaneous
The end of the year is a time for lists. Our Ten Favorite Books, Twelve Movies We Loved, Twenty-Seven TikToks that Perfectly Captured the National Mood in 2022. We’re a society obsessed with rankings — with the quantification of media, the comparison of culture, the litanization of everything. We writers are the worst of the […]
Say what you will about 2022, but for me, it’s been a great year of reading. By that I mean, I’ve read a lot of really good books. I keep my yearly book list only for myself, and I try not to get competitive about racking up numbers. The reading itself is the point. That […]
Finally, we’re nearing the year’s end — a time to rest, reset, and reflect. Even the apps on my phone are eager to review my year, feeding my own data back to me: Strava tells me how many miles I’ve biked, Reddit shows me the number of posts I’ve read, and Spotify feeds me a […]
Last night I spent time with a friend who doesn’t have a cell phone. Can you imagine that? He shrugged and said he finds he doesn’t really need one. He had a flip phone for a while, then 3G went offline and he decided not to re-up. I wanted to cling to the hem of […]
Navajo legends speak of angry mountains that must be calmed with tobacco offerings. It’s one of the most ancient examples of intergenerational trauma in a people who have experienced plenty more since. The memories of the angry mountain in question have been lost, but a cultural nervousness around the harmless ranges of Arizona and New […]
When you’re exceedingly tiny, you can live almost anywhere – in an eyelash follicle, between grains of sand, or on an insect’s wing. You can probably find food and plenty of it, whether you prefer dead skin cells, blood, sap, or rotting vegetation. You can also get away with almost anything, like the male, deep […]
HELEN: I’m thankful for all the new skills I’ve developed in the last 2.5 years. That’s how I’ve kept myself sane in pandemic times. And I’m using them – I’m trying to make a bunch of Christmas tree ornaments with my quilting and embroidery skills by the first weekend in December, for example, and I […]