Facebook tells me it’s been a year since I confessed my kitten ignorance.

The first GOP debates in the 2016 election are now over and done for a whole fifteen minutes, and now it’s time to guess what happens next, because elections are fun and all (I love my “I Voted” sticker!) but what’s really fun is pretending to be a political psychic. Wearing my bedraggled Republican hat that’s been in…

In our house, the agreement is: Karen cooks, Boyfriend cleans up. I hate cleaning up my own messes, but I don’t mind making them. Boyfriend rarely makes anything besides banana bread and chili, so we have agreed this is a fair distribution of labor, particularly if I am allowed to yell, “COME STIR THIS NOW.”

All week, I’ve been thinking about free stuff. Specifically, which things should be free to all Americans. I admit that I’m a big fan of free stuff generally (who doesn’t like free?) but the issue was brought into sharper focus after two conversations with friends.

1. You’re apparently not supposed to get them from the same litter because then they love each other more than you.

In the days after my stepdad died, I marveled at myself from what seemed like a distance. “Wow,” I thought, “You seem chill. Chipper. Happy.” And in a way, I was. With my mother in Hawaii and me in Michigan, dropping everything to run to her side as soon as I heard was impractical. I needed to talk to my boss about…

For all of my twenties, I wanted a dog but was not in a place to get one.

Many girls got their first taste of science fiction in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. The novel, if you haven’t read it, is about a young woman who travels across galaxies via tesseract to save her father. Whether you stayed with Meg Murry because you knew she was going to go on an adventure or you went on the…

In an e-mail none of us were supposed to read, famed nerd-patter writer Aaron Sorkin said something sort of true: women in Hollywood get crappy roles.

A few weeks ago, I lent my smartphone to my nineteen-year-old cousin while I was getting my hair cut. I thought she would use it to download Candy Crush or play Words With Friends, but when she handed the phone back to me, she smirked and pointed to the Tinder icon. And then I heard the "bzzzz" of an incoming message.

The interweb and teevee media have picked up on a social media-driven attempt to get Old Navy to stop charging more money for plus size clothing. You know it's serious when a Change.org petition starts to circle. And by "serious" I mean, "likely to peter out soon-ish."

The day my stepsister delivered her daughter, I don't think I got any work done. I clicked back and forth between her Facebook page and her husband's, refreshing often just in case. He tagged her periodically, talking about her progress and cheering her on. I knew I was wasting company time, but I wasn't sure if I was…

I met my stepdad when I was six years old. The first joke he ever told me: "I have blue hair, 'cuz it all blew away, you see?" I liked that one—the rest of his jokes, it took me awhile to understand. I remember him hurting my feelings a lot when I was little, because his sense of humor was dry and sarcastic. My little…