I started this blog when I was 23 and moving from Los Angeles back home to New York. I was young and had no idea what I was doing with my life ( Read more... )

So I go to the tub this morning to see a tiny black bug-no bigger than a tomato seed and teardrop shaped-crawling around near the drain of our white bathtub. And so I call Jonathan and say, “Hey-there’s one of those tiny little black bugs under the bathtub faucet. Can you get him out of the tub so he doesn’t drown when I take a shower?” And so ( Read more... )

My mother and I are sitting in her glacier-colored Volkswagon Passat, outside a Panera Bread in the parking lot of a strip mall. She is on her lunch break from work. I drove to her office to pick her up and take her out to lunch but now we are at a standstill in the parked car and she is shaking her head, biting her lower lip, telling me she ( Read more... )

I am perusing Craigslist like I do far too often, always searching for the job that will make me perfectly content and fulfilled and not require working weekends and holidays and also, ideally, I am allowed to bring my dog. A 9-5 job in a place where I can wear sneakers and ratty T-shirts, where they are in the midst of trying something called “ ( Read more... )

If you had asked me 24 hours earlier what the Bolivian flag looked like I would have shrugged my shoulders and said, “I have no idea.” I knew that Argentina’s flag is light blue and white stripes (like their soccer uniforms) with a sun in the center and I know that Brazil’s is green, with that yellow diamond holding some sort of planet full of ( Read more... )

I always feel out of place proctoring tests at the nearby catholic high school because everybody is either a teenager, a heavyset bleached blonde woman, or a nun. There is a spattering of Franciscan brothers and one or two non-religious male teachers, but everyone is either in the midst of their adolescence or in their early to mid 50’s, so my ( Read more... )

My track coach was one of those terrifying people who was always telling you to “run through the pain.” This was the late 90’s, when “No Fear” T-shirts and Nike slogans had taken over and people became fond of sayings like “Pain is weakness leaving the body” and “Second Place is the First Loser,” and no one was more fond of these sayings than high ( Read more... )

The woman walks into the restaurant smiling. I see her only out of the corner of my eye because I am busy getting something for another customer, but I watch as the hostess leads her to a round corner booth, setting down two menus. The woman sits, sliding deep into the booth and stares dreamily out across the restaurant. She is wearing a white ( Read more... )

When Aidan Reese Podgarsky-Carlson arrived in the world, weighing 3 lbs. 11oz, I was wandering through a Bed Bath and Beyond, picking up Quiche pans. I was using up the remainder of a gift card by wandering the store, aimlessly picking up vegetable brushes and spatulas and soap dispensers, and when I found the quiche pans, I thought, “Oh, nice. ( Read more... )

I sit with my friend Guy in a shitty vegetarian diner eating disgusting, crustless pie that is so awful I would feel bad feeding it to a cat. We meet once a month or so-- not always in a shitty vegetarian diner-- and never again in THIS shitty vegetarian diner because Jesus Christ, this pie is disgusting-- but we meet once a month to talk about ( Read more... )