I've found a decent steady-state in my relationship with Twitter. I don't pretend like I can keep up with it, but check in pretty often and find something I like about it every time I do. A couple days ago what I found was a very brief video, recorded by a black woman confronting the white woman who had been following her while she was out walking ( Read more... )

I started wearing my hair super-short when I was in elementary school. Hard to say exactly when, but certainly by third grade I had tried it out. That combined with the way I preferred to dress and a somewhat-late and sudden puberty meant that I spent years being routinely mistaken for a boy. Every time it happened I was delighted ( Read more... )

This very lengthy MetaFilter thread about emotional labor, and how strongly it's gender-coded, is fascinating me to the point of distraction. I've emailed it to a few colleagues, can't shut up about it to Andy, and every time I refresh the thread, there's a whole batch of new comments that I've been reading all week, ten minutes or so at a time. ( Read more... )

Last December, a couple rounds into the night, a friend and I decided to go to Barcelona in the spring for Primavera Sound. Unlike a lot of semi-drunk good ideas, we followed through on this one, and now the trip is just a little more than a week away, so I'm spending a lot of time with the festival-curated Spotify playlist, mostly in my office in ( Read more... )

The first day of spring is going to be strange for me for a while, I think. Last year it was the day my grandfather died, and from now on it will be an anniversary I observe whether I'm aware of it or not. His death hit me harder than I expected it to, and it was probably for the best that I didn't see my family until a month later for his memorial ( Read more... )

I have a snow day ritual that is sort of counterintuitive, born on a weekend in 2003 when I got stuck at a friend's house in Watertown by a snowstorm and got so stir-crazy that I borrowed a pair of Doc Martens from her and, fortified with Chambord-spiked hot chocolate, walked to Harvard Square. When I know a big storm is coming, I delay any errands ( Read more... )

It's a neat coincidence that the day a set of remarkably un-diverse Oscar nominations were announced, and the week Eddie Huang threw a bit of a call-out bomb, and a couple of days before we saw Selma, Andy and I finished a three-day binge-watch of TransparentI didn't know much about the show, and what I did now had mostly to do with its A-plot ( Read more... )

There used to be a dive-y bar on the outskirts of Central Square that I didn't like to walk past. It wasn't a dive bar like the ones my friends and I liked, where the diviness was sort of cultivated and semi-ironic. It was a serious dive, for serious drinkers, and every time I passed it one of the patrons would say something to me that I didn't ( Read more... )

On Saturday I went hunting for an old entry I wrote back in 2002 and passed a couple of hours remembering things that I did and said and felt during the first couple of months after Andy showed up semi-unexpectedly at my 24th birthday party with the sign from a CTA bus stop and a Kurosawa Critierion Collection DVD. He stayed late, sitting with me ( Read more... )

A perennial travel debate is New versus Familiar. It's a good debate because there are no right or wrong answers, and there is real value in each approach, but my international travel has always been heavily tilted towards the New.* Sometimes I split the difference by going somewhere New that is also relatively Familiar, like my visit to Morocco ( Read more... )