Category: Everywhereist

It is March. I am standing in my kitchen in my PJs, eating Christmas candy that I purchased from the Goodwill.

To be clear, it was not my intention to be eating yuletide-themed confections on the precipice of spring, like Miss Havisham, but for snacks. It’s just that sometimes in life we find ourselves in places we never expected. A police holding cell. Tottering on the brink of totalitarianism. Florida.

When I purchased the candy – before Christmas, I might add, as I proudly hitch up the burlap sack I am wearing as trousers – only some of it was from the Goodwill. I am telling you this because I want you to think I am holding it together. That I am not just randomly opening up bags on the shelves at the thrift store and shoving the contents into my mouth, hoping that it’s edible and not filled with

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Despite my numerous protestations, several letters to the editor, and one shockingly well-funded Kickstarter, Thanksgiving is somehow upon us again. If you are anything like me (clinically depressed and awesome), you are wondering how we ended up here again. In my case, I assume it’s punishment for the time I said Vince Vaughn was “kind of bangable” in the early 2000s.

For the record, I don’t hate the holidays (though societally, we have entire airplane hangar of shit to unpack around Thanksgiving). I don’t even hate cooking for the holidays. But I hate the way that gender roles around cooking and hosting become more entrenched sometime around November 10th, and don’t let up until mid-January, or, for some people, ever.

In 2022, I wrote about how it’s okay to buy pumpkin pie (it is! If you want to! It’s an incredibly easy shortcut and honestly there has never been

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Hello. Hi. It’s me. Hey. Howya doing?

Yeah, ME, TOO. (Sobs turn into maniacal laughing.) (Slowly transforms into The Joker.)

It was a tough year before this past Tuesday, to be honest. If someone had asked me, I would have easily marked it one of the most difficult ones of my personal and professional life.

My aunt died earlier this year. Her death was shocking in that particular way of those who have spent decades cheating their mortality. In her constant illness she seemed somehow interminable. Her husband, my uncle, often joked that she’d outlive us all.

Instead we buried her in early March.

This woman, who yelled at her neighbors when they tried to tell her homosexuality was a sin, who watched Fox News because she “wanted to know what her enemies were thinking,” was a wisp when she died.

“She’d wrung every ounce of life out of

★★★

Idea Has Potential.

I don’t hate the idea of this book. It feels like the author (full disclosure: it me) doesn’t really have a clear idea of it, and instead of writing the book they keep getting distracted and reading about dysfunctional relationships on reddit. I keep calling it a “book proposal” even though it mostly consists of a bunch of post-its and random sentences scribbled on the back of Rite-Aid receipts, but it’s not … bad? It feels way better than the author’s other previous DNF post-it-note book ideas.

★★★½

A Vast Improvement!

I started writing on my computer?! (This makes the “proposal” as I insist on calling it, much easier to read). I had previously said that I “didn’t want to do that” because it was “too intimidating” which is a certifiably bonkers thing for a writer to say. You shouldn’t be afraid of the thing

People keep reminding me it is January. I consider this an act of aggression. I keep writing “October” on all my checks. I also keep writing 1997. I also keep writing checks? What the hell is even going on with January, anyway? How can a January ever possibly feel normal? The year just started; the opening credits for it are still rolling, people are still looking for their seats. And yet here we are, already mid-way through the first month of the year, 1/24th of the way into 2024. All of us collectively trying to ignore the fact that Januarys are really just a leftover of the year that preceded it. There are extremely important dates therein (MLK Day, Inauguration Day, Insurrection Day, Everyone Being Mad at Taylor Swift for Showing Her Face in a Sacred Men’s Space Day(s)), and some of us just aren’t in the right mindset to

It’s the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and as holidays bear down upon us, I find myself repeating the same refrain again and again: You do not need to make pumpkin pie from scratch. You do not need to make anything from scratch. You do not need to recreate a family recipe passed down for generations. Your dead relatives won’t notice. They’re dead.

You can phone it all in while you quietly drink a cocktail. The “cocktail” can just be vodka served in a plastic mug shaped like a turkey.

I want people to know this. We all need to be reminded that the time that we spend in our kitchens should be a choice.

It should be. It isn’t always.

Among heterosexual couples, women are much more likely than their male partners to do the majority of the cooking and meal prep (a fact that holds true whether or not a

Look, look, here’s the thing:

I have watched the footage of Taylor Swift running towards Travis Kelce and hugging him a bazillion times now, and if you are a person who is alive and has a internet connection, or even a person who doesn’t have an internet connection, even if you are just a dead racoon, you’ve also seen it, because this video transcends cyberspacetime and the mortal coil. This video is very important, and people (and dead raccoons) care about it a great deal. I, a person who knows exactly one and a half Taylor Swift songs (“Shake it Off” and another one about … I want to say revenge?) have watched it approximately 8,000 times. Among people I follow on various socially media sites, it has been analyzed more than the Zapruder footage.

“LET US JUST ENJOY THIS,” someone screamed at me, and I get it. I am

While conducting an archeological dig of my office, unearthing crumbling notebooks that contained the early drafts of all the books I have written, and all the books intended to write but somehow did not, I found a box of old photos. They were from a summer I’d spent in Europe when I was 20 years old, heartbroken and an utter mess, a pile of emotion barely held together by the straps of her crocheted halter top. It was 2001, my grandparents had just died, and I’d gotten dumped by my boyfriend. Over the phone. Four days before my grandfather’s funeral. (It is a story I relay in my first book, which you should read because it’s somehow sort of … funny?)

I made the sudden and financially irresponsible decision to skip town, buying a round trip ticket to Rome through London, to spend the summer with my aunt and uncle

You might have heard by now (from me, and the way I keep talking about it all the time, on this site, and also on social media, and in real life) THAT I HAVE A NEW BOOK COMING OUT. (Not apologizing for the all caps. I’m excited.) And if you haven’t already pre-ordered, please consider doing so OMG DO IT NOW. Pre-orders are critical to a book’s success. They count towards the first week of sales, which means that they are the strongest chance an author has to make it onto a bestseller list. And if that happens, more people hear about the book, which means more sales, which creates its own momentum. (Also, I would freak the out for the rest of my life?)

For a book like mine (weird, niche, written by a non-famous regular person who poops sitting down), THIS IS HUGE AND IMPORTANT. Plus, like,

I am old enough to remember when the Internet was a largely useless place for most people. My college dormmates would sit patiently, waiting hours for image files to download in large ribboned chunks, in hopes of something salacious appearing. If the image was mislabeled, they could find that they’d waited a good twenty minutes for what they thought was a bikini pic of Kathy Ireland but turned out to be a photo Macho Man Randy Savage. It was like the whole worldwide web was a bit of a silly prank, a place where we spent small swathes of time, where we used PINE to check our email every three days or so.

Over the years, it spread like a creeping ivy. A few innocuous vines at first, and then it was everywhere, so ubiquitous and suffocating that no part of our lives was untouched. Recently, my friend’s kitchen faucet