Apparently they're making a sequel to this horror movie from a few years back called The Conjuring. It makes me weirdly melancholy. See, my mom always loved horror movies, but never had anyone in the family to see them with her. When we were kids we didn't like them, so she always had to find somebody else to go with if she wanted to catch one in ( Read more... )

Today would have been my mother's sixty-third birthday. My dad took this picture of a page of one of her journals and sent it today:


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Nostalgia seems to be a big thing lately, at least if society perceives you to be a nerd. The media lately is all about making money by reviving so-called “nostalgia properties,” making rebooted versions of things you supposedly will see now because you liked them as a kid ( Read more... )

My mother loved Halloween ( Read more... )

So I did what I was threatening to do, changed my hair color for the first time in my life. Because I wanted to be Betty Draper for Halloween but don’t have the right coloring for it, the idea occurred that maybe I could use the costume as an excuse to change it. The idea, once pondered, of a change seemed nice, not just for the costume but to try ( Read more... )

My granddad’s funeral was held at Our Lady of Lourdes, the Catholic church of Burgettstown, Pennsylvania, the small coal-mine-adjacent town where my dad grew up. But it was also the place where my parents were married, almost forty years before. I was there before, most recently when my grandmother passed and I attended her service, but that was ( Read more... )

I have talked about my mother’s death here before. But today, on the one-year anniversary of her passing, I want to talk about the night she died. I don’t have much point to make. This is a very disjointed, stream-of-consciousness entry. But I’m ready to talk about it, and I want to have a record of what it was like ( Read more... )

Spoilers ahead for Mad Men season 7. Sorry.Betty Draper died of cancer. And I don’t know how to react ( Read more... )

I have an odd relationship to the show Mad Men. I've watched it several times through, and I really admire it on many levels. Currently it's my best reference for the writing of subtext, something I'm really bad at and need to learn to improve. And the costuming is masterful; analysis of it really teaches you how to do it. But I wouldn't exactly ( Read more... )

Today would have been my mother's sixty-second birthday, the first pass of her birthday since she died ( Read more... )