Dear Self-Interrupters,
You don’t know who you are, but I do. I’m the one listening, giving you my undivided attention while you prattle on about how your boss can joke around with you but sometimes he jokes about how lazy you are, which might actually be true and what if he…
AND THEN YOU ARE ON YOUR PHONE LAUGHING AT JARED’S TEXT MESSAGE.
You have just self-interrupted, and it makes me feel like shit. Because I was listening.
And so you know, it’s hard to be a good listener. It’s a choice. I was not just nodding over here. I was for real listening.
I was NOT glancing at those girls.
I was NOT staring at your breasts.
I was—for once—NOT planning the plot of my first novel.
What I WAS doing: I was actually absorbing your life and getting prepared to respond in a way...
Lifestyle
Dear Class of 1994,
I regret to announce my resignation as “Most Likely to Succeed.” Nearly twenty years since the senior superlative was announced in our yearbook, it’s clear that I’ve fallen short of your expectations. Meanwhile, “Most Popular” Jennifer B. recently received 44 happy birthday wishes on her Facebook timeline.
In these uncertain times, there is talk of different definitions of what it means to succeed: loving your job regardless of financial reward, having a family, attaining internal peace. But as eighteen-year-olds in rural Florida, we saw only one road to success: amassing status and wealth—and/or orange grove acreage.
I understand the hope you had in me. I was part of the Academic Team. I drove a new Ford Mustang, surely the first of many sports cars. I swept...
2,097
Dear #fitgirls,
I’m worried that if I see another green smoothie on your Instagram, I might throw up on it. Or in it. The minute I see your muscular bodies, fluoride smiles and read you telling me I have the moves, my body is thrown into a fit. Not fit the way you’d like it. I am motivated away from your sugar-free dessert recipes on your blog and want to go and have myself a cake.
I am confused because you all seem so high-performance, but I can’t keep my heart rate up at 85% RPM. In fact I don’t feel like that’s very regular. Thankfully I took your quinoa salad recipe advice, and that has kept me regular. But regular is not very high-performance is it?
The #ThankfulnessThursday hashtag on Instagram confused me. I muddled it up with #ThrowbackThursday. I realized that I shouldn’...
2,686
Dear mango fly larva currently taking up residence in my left buttock,
It’s time to come out of there now. I’m serious. I’ve had enough. A woman’s got a limit, a limit to how much she can take and a right to the sovereignty of her own butt—both cheeks. But you don’t care about any of that, do you? You just perch smugly in the little home you’ve carved out down there, squirming and writhing, knowing full well that my longstanding fear of going under the knife basically guarantees you rent control until you’ve pupated.
Or so you thought. Because I’m done.
Why me, anyway? Looking objectively at the situation, it now seems it was mere opportunity, not attraction, that brought us together. That hurts more than anything, even more than when you dig your pincers into the subcutaneous...
4,445
Dear Ladies,
I don’t know you and you don’t me.
Yet, when you noticed the basketball “hiding” under my shirt and asked if I knew the baby’s sex, and you learned that I already have a two-and-a-half-year-old son, and I am expecting another son, you felt the need to sigh heavily and say:
“Oh, maybe next time you’ll have a girl.”
Maybe, Farmer’s Market Lady, just maybe, next time you won’t feel the need to add your two cents when I’m having a lovely conversation with the butcher at the deli counter who is slicing my Boar’s Head turkey breast, and confessing how sexy he finds pregnant women. Maybe you won’t assume that I’m having a third baby when I HAVEN’T EVEN HAD THE SECOND ONE YET! And maybe, just maybe, you won’t assume that I was “trying for a girl” this time.
And, you,...
5,023
Dear Ladies,
I don’t know you and you don’t me.
Yet, when you noticed the basketball “hiding” under my shirt and asked if I knew the baby’s sex, and you learned that I already have a two-and-a-half-year-old son, and I am expecting another son, you felt the need to sigh heavily and say:
“Oh, maybe next time you’ll have a girl.”
Maybe, Farmer’s Market Lady, just maybe, next time you won’t feel the need to add your two cents when I’m having a lovely conversation with the butcher at the deli counter who is slicing my Boar’s Head turkey breast, and confessing how sexy he finds pregnant women. Maybe you won’t assume that I’m having a third baby when I HAVEN’T EVEN HAD THE SECOND ONE YET! And maybe, just maybe, you won’t assume that I was “trying for a girl” this time.
And, you,...
5,383
Dear truckers,
I found your piss. Twenty-three bottles, to be exact, in the grass along an I-94 entrance ramp. I assume you intended to leave them there. Why else would there be so many? The golden-amber hue of my first find—a gallon jug of Arizona Iced Tea—implied, well, tea, so I picked it up with less care than I otherwise would have shown. The lid, which you failed to secure, fell off, and your stench splashed out onto the grass and splattered across my tennis shoes.
In the heat of the late summer morning, the odor overwhelmed me, and I heaved into the grass. What sort of monster, I thought, would do such a thing? That was before I found the other twenty two bottles. Mountain Dew, Sobe Peach, Propel Berry. Some of you, in a surge of irony, had chosen Aquafina or Ice Mountain...
2,713
Dear Paleo Diet Enthusiasts,
The thing is, we just don’t care about what you eat, or why. And we’re tired of your pseudo-science rationalization of why this new diet is the best thing you’ve ever done. But what’s really ridiculous is how presumptuous it is of you to assume you know what our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate way back in the Stone Age. What do you really even know about the Stone Age? Have you even thought about it since fifth grade? It was a hard life back then. Just to survive was a real challenge. Apparently, language was pretty new, and yet you think they had time to make kale chips and bake with coconut flour. Amazing.
There is one thing that would impress me about the Paleo Diet, and that’s if you went full on. Like, move into a cave and start hunting your meat and...
2,815
Dear ugly mug I painted at Paint A Dream last weekend,
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to turn out this way. Do you think I wanted this to happen? I am not that horrible of a person.
I knew you were the one right away. I chose you above all the other mugs and plates and cat figurines. How could I deny your seductive lip, your curvaceous handle, your sturdy broad base? I cleaned you, scrubbed you with the little round sponge provided by Lexi of the Paint A Dream staff. I dipped the sponge into a Dixie cup of water and gently washed you, like you were my beloved grandmother, too frail and unknowing to wash yourself. Couldn’t you tell I wanted only the best for you?
I whispered into your cavernous mug-ear, “What color would you like to be?” You said nothing. Coy. I closed my eyes...
2,527
Dear MTA Riders of the Male Persuasion,
I know you like to spread your chests wide, inhaling deeply and filling your lungs with that special patriarchal air that is your birthright. I know you need to place your legs in wide stances to give ample room to your massive testicles, which you have inherited after generations of Darwinism have assured only the largest and best scrotum survive. I know you need to mount your body against the entire center subway pole, claiming your land like Columbus. I get that.
Therefore, as a woman who is subordinate to your powerful Y chromosome, I will happily stand in the middle of the subway car, rudderless. A ship out at sea, if you will. Perhaps if I were a little taller, I could reach the bars that run across the ceiling of the cars. Alas, I am...
2,840