Above photo: Between Two Knees (2019): Wotko Long, Rachel Crowl, April Ortiz, Derek Garza, Shaun Taylor-Corbett. Photo by Jenny Graham. Minutes before the curtain rose on the night we saw Between Two Knees, my husband Rand received a text from our friend Shaun, who is in the show. “Sorry in advance,” Shaun wrote, with a […]
It has been two years since my memoir came out, and the reality of that dream coming true has both sunk in and managed to become surreal. Sometimes, I need a reminder that it all actually happened. And then someone will mention it to me, or email me to tell me that they just finished […]
Ten years. It’s been ten years since I started this blog. Ten years since Rand accidentally named this site because he misheard me when I suggested “The Everywhere List”. Ten years since we registered the domain. A decade of writing posts – some good, some utterly embarrassing, some very, very outdated. The wormhole created by […]
Recently my Twitter replies were doused in gasoline and set alight. It’s been both somewhat alarming and interesting. (Uncontrollable, raging fires usually are.) I wrote this tweet in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Seattle after I’d had a day. An exhausting, emotionally draining day filled with some of the more intense stuff you […]
The problem with any writer who happens to experience that rare, fleeting phenomenon known as “external validation” is that for a few moments, we go a little mad. Which is to say: we start believing our own hype. And for a writer, truly, what greater madness is there than believing in yourself? Don’t get me […]
I graduated high school in 1998, either (depending on which arbitrary marker you choose) the last of Gen-Xers or the first of the Millennials. Like so many of us who came of age in the 90s, Friends was a delightful, aspirational glimpse of the future. (I had no perspective to realize that my friends of […]
My writing pitches don’t get accepted often. Sometimes an editor will contact me directly, and I’ll send them a piece, and if it gets published, it may do quite well (my piece on bullying for The Washington Post was an example of that), but it rarely gets to that point. More often than not, I’ll […]
Hello, hi, yes, I would like to speak to the manager please? No, I don’t think that this is something you could help me with … okay. Okay, fine. Yes, so I’ve been shopping here for several years, and it’s always been a really positive experience. But yesterday I was walking down the freezer aisle […]
(Pictured above: me during a far less neurotic presentation.) I am standing in front of a crowd under blinding fluorescent lights. They appear to be listening to my every word. And I am positively bombing. The room is too bright, and I can see everyone’s faces, but I am absolutely unable to read their expressions. […]
We went to Germany, and I cried. Not right away. It wasn’t until the last day that I finally did. Rand asked if I wanted to rent a car to go down to see my father’s grave. He asked me in the early hours of the morning, when jet lag had us both exhausted but […]
I was recently nominated for a James Beard Award for journalism, and statement which makes as much sense as saying “I was nominated for a Grammy for this cookie that I just ate.” The other nominees in my category are – I kid you not – The New York Times and The Atlantic. I submitted […]
I am scheduled to leave for Germany in several days. I have already told my husband that I don’t want to go, in a whining tone that stretches syllables out so far that the words they once formed are barely recognizable. As a woman nearing the aging of forty, this is how I am coping […]
I am on occasion asked for relationship advice. I often do not know how to reply. The list of things I could tell people is long and winding, may be entirely irrelevant, and varies from season to season and day to day. In summer, I learn to appreciate freckles and to not mind when the […]
Note: this post contains some content that may be upsetting for certain readers – including mention of torture and the Cambodian genocide. ————— My trip to Cambodia feels so long ago – more than five years – that I have to remind myself that I was there. I look at the photos, and see myself […]
(Note: this piece does not link to any of the shooter’s video or manifesto directly, but some of the news sites that I link to may do so. A few include screencaps of his 4-chan forum discussions. Please click with caution.) 49 people died yesterday, gunned down in two mosques in coordinated attacks across New […]