My bf and I live in a warehouse that stretches from a busy street to a back alley. We love to be outside but lack a backyard, so we spent a lot of time in the alley, which was cozy despite being open to public traffic. Two lots across the alley are undeveloped and overgrown with tropical vegetation and large oak…

The Voice from the Water

It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving about 10 years ago. My spouse was still at work, and our two young daughters were off with my mom, who had picked them up after school. I walked into the kitchen after our dog greeted me at the door.

It’s early fall, 2017. We had just fully fenced and added gardens to our backyard, including a lovely fairy path on a narrow stretch of dirt that separated our property from the apartment complex next door. With tall grasses, flowers, and stepping stones it made a magical little space that my daughter loved to run…

Back in the early aughts, I had been dating my now-husband for a few months. We drove out to my parents’ house, where my sister and her three children were also visiting for the day. My sister’s youngest daughter was probably about 3 at the time. My boyfriend went outside to have a cigarette, and the kids were playing…

OK, four stories: One is uncanny, two are deeply creepy, and one is rather sweet.

When I was a young woman I lived in an old house that had been broken up into apartments. Mine was on the second floor. Several times, I heard the outer door open and close heavily, and footsteps come up the stairs and stop outside my…

Any woman with a podcast probably gets death threats. 

The past few weeks here in South Korea have been pretty awful, pretty much coronavirus-terror all day every day, so Bong’s wins are some really welcome happy news.

Butter Dish Energy

Butter Distribution Etiquette, obviously.

If this stuff is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Any blue in Nov 2020 works for me!

When you are the designated scapegoat in a family of narcissists and flying monkeys, just waking up and being alive on Thanksgiving is a horror show. 

Didn’t ruin the entire meal, but we still talk about the time in 2008 that my dad, the designated gravy maker, pull a box of what he thought was chicken or turkey stock out of the fridge and instead proceeded to use concentrated chai latte mix as the base for the gravy.

That’s not the point at all. It’s that all of us are already carrying a certain amount of emotional burden on any given day. There is nothing narcissistic to recognize their are moments in which we don’t have the bandwidth to safely carry other people’s.

Remember a couple Halloweens ago when he misunderstood the concept of socialism re: his kids’ candy?

This was like eating a whole sheetcake with extra frosting.

What kind of upside down world do you live in if Jeopardy is first? I have lived in multiple states, on both coasts, and in the north and the south. The wheel is first and Jeopardy is second. 

Knowing that my dad agrees with everything Trump does and says, I wish I would have known that repeating a lie over and over again would absolve me of any wrongdoing growing up.