It was this: a rusty U-Haul truck smelling of dog breath and vinyl. Six, seven years ago, maybe more? Ken and I were somewhere near Arizona, moving our hearts and our dish towels from Los Angeles to his Midwestern hometown. My father-in-law was sick, we’d learned two weeks prior. We’d need to come home soon.
I used to write gift guides. I’d write them for magazines, or websites – gift guides for the smelly co-ed, gift guides for the Ohio stockbroker cousin you see once annually, gift guides for the receptionist that, when cornered at the office Christmas party, admits that she really and truly wants to be an artist
We know that labels are for jars, and we know that we are not jars. And yet, it is an easy trap, boxing ourselves into characters or avatars, for brevity’s sake, of course. We have 140 characters, 5 minutes in the elevator, 10 minutes at a dinner party to explain ourselves, to introduce the passion
This post was written with and for Glade – thanks for reading! So, shortly after publishing this post, it snowed. It snowed and snowed and then stuck to the pavement, and the result was an extra three inches on the ground, and perhaps an extra three inches around my waist from eating my emotions. But
It happened like this. I went to bed last week with a voice – albeit a throaty, hoarse one – and I woke without one. I was in Austin, scheduled to keynote a conference with a gaggle of women who I simply couldn’t wait to meet. They were “Me, too” women – the kind that
Just last week, in the kitchen, where she was still not yet tall enough to reach the pistachios, she asks, “Where’d you guys get me?” “From heaven,” says Ken, one room over, because he comes up with great, short answers, the kind that end in a period. Factual. Truth. A statement. My sentences end in
It started Sunday, with the tantrums. They were not hers, but mine, and they were fueled by a variety of external factors, excuses – too much noise, not enough rest, too much sugar, not enough time – and I had become itchy with discontent. I was on edge, a jagged, barbed wire version of myself
As much as I talk about less, about purchasing less and striving for less and working toward less, I have quite a bit of more. My job, this brown swirly mix of writing and styling and designing and producing, creates a tornado of stuff. Daily, there are cardboard boxes arriving at the door, ready to