Tomorrow is Monday. I got nothing scheduled tomorrow. So I can spend one more day trying to sleep off this cold. I’ll watch Supernatural on Netflix and Adventure Time on Hulu, the two shows I’ve chosento see me through this month. When I’m uncomfortable, I like to watch shows so removed from reality that I…
I’ve laid down two toothbrushes and a tiny travel pack of Colgate. And two fist sized jawbreakers on sticks. The cashier starts to chuckle and I slam my hand down a little too hard on the pine wood counter. Every goddamn thing in this place is pine wood that looks like it’s been lacquered with…
I don’t even know what you’d call it. I called myself a “humorist” in the program but that was because my vocabulary is lacking. In a talent show, where does, “Making witty observations while wildly gesticulating in front of a slide show of 19th century underwear” fall? My friend Sonja, who is…
You know how people like to end their fortune cookies with “in bed”? That’s fun. Gus and I made up, “with a shovel in a mass grave,” to end our fortunes and that was funner. “You will overcome a great challenge (with a shovel in a mass grave.)” But we’ve got a better one now.…
Every summer I sit in the damp heat of the glassed in “Parent Aquarium” at the University’s pool and watch my daughter learn to swim. This year, as I was signing her up at the Fitness Center, I couldn’t stop looking at their rock wall. Brand new, forty feet high, weird little pockets and pinches…
I live in a town called Independence. Actually I live in the town next to it…but you know how old small towns bleed together over the century, connected by spattered little strip malls and one-story office buildings? We’ve got that going on. If my name were “Christmas Oneill,” I wouldn’t make a big deal…
My husband had this terrifying maniac of a friend years ago. Lloyd. Lloyd accidentally got married one day, when the girl he was sleeping with turned his post-coital hyperbole into a short lived and deranged reality. Their marriage was brief and unhappy. When Lloyd was mad at his wife, he’d get up in the…
LE is shuffling out of the pink froth of little-girlhood into the kaleidoscopic colors of kid-hood. So she doesn’t dress-up anymore, in flouncy pink skirts with clashing wrinkled leggings and a broken Barbie tiara. But she got a toy microphone for Christmas. Along with a Belinda Carlisle CD and…a Lady Gaga CD. I put them…
Gus once said this about Christmas. “It’s a fire women start, and then they run around screaming because everything is on fire.” If women vanished from the earth Christmas would, for the most part, go with them. If the holiday survived I imagine it reverting to some sort of raucous medieval feast, with spit roasted…
I am a Girl Scout co-leader this year. I didn’t want to be. I’m brutally lazy. I like to lay down at meetings. My body rejects order and organization like a transplanted monkey liver. But there was what Gus calls, “a power vacuum,” and I was the only one to fill it. Then he…
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