I got so good at pool I had my own cue. It was a gift from a guy whose name I kept forgetting, maybe Peter, maybe Mike, a guy I’d agreed to marry during a Christmas Eve drunk. It was a candy-apple-red cue, had its own case, broke beautifully, cracked into the cue ball, scattered the tight rack of twelve colored balls like a spray of smashed glass. It was 1999, and I kept a bottle of Maker’s Mark at […]
The folly of youth is like Funfetti cake: sweet and fun-seeming, with pastel pink and blue and green chunks of whatsits, only serving to break your teeth and hasten the onset of childhood diabetes. It’s the same folly that, coupled with three Bud Lights, will make you think you can jump a CTA turnstile with no repercussions. My second year in Chicago, my roommate, Amber, our friend, Dan, and I went to see Fosse at the Oriental Theatre. We were […]
Recently a prospective employer told me that the job I was interviewing for had received 350 applications in response to the posting. I considered what this meant: my chances of getting offered the job were one in 350, or .2 percent, as in two tenths of one percent. Harvard University currently has an acceptance rate of 5.9 percent, or 30 times the acceptance rate of the entry level job I was interviewing for. So, it’s come to this: I’m preparing […]
Beginnings. To begin. To do something. Start something. Activate. Embark. Impulse. Get going. Go into. Beginnings. The unknown. Unfamiliar. Uncertainty. Beginnings. Something you are doing for the first time. Something, after which, you will never be the same.
When I was nine, my parents sent me to sleep-away camp for two weeks. It took me only one week to bring the place to its knees. Now the prospect of sleep-away camp was awesome, because when you are a painfully awkward, try-hard bag of weird with no friends and mean stupid brothers, summer camp is basically your one hope for positive human interaction during the summer. Possibly, just possibly, there will be a cool counselor who will teach you […]
I’m having this problem. It’s kind of embarrassing. Like I’ve been withdrawing from people and doubting my life choices. I don’t know what you do when you have a problem like this. Some people consult a religious text or a self-help book. Maybe some poetry, if it’s that kind of problem. But right now, I need something practical — hypothesized, tested, retested. I need something that can accurately predict the future to within three significant digits. What I need, clearly, […]
In the summer of 2007, I was just finishing my first year of grad school, which means I was a fucking idiot—especially when it came to matters of adulthood. My roommate and I didn’t pack anything until the day we had to be out of our apartment. That morning, his parents came and helped him, took his bed in their pick-up truck and packed his clothes in boxes the way regular humans pack clothes. I shoved all of mine in […]
I’m not one of these people who considers herself as a romantic. I can appreciate romance, but that’s only if you understand the word “appreciate” to mean “roll my eyes in bitter, disgusted jealousy while bearing witness to romantic things happening to someone other than myself.” Which always seems to be the goddamned case. It’s not that I enjoy seething in a blinding rage over the rapidly congealing Lean Cuisine on my desk while the girl I share an office […]
Author’s Note: The following piece was crafted specifically for performance and I’ve done my best through text and punctuation to make it read as choppy and frenetic on the page as it was in person. At certain points, denoted by bold text, I took a seat in the front row and screamed at an empty stage. The parts in italics indicate a number of affectations not worth explaining. Hey, Basilo! Everyone’s looking at your double chin and stupid outfit. You […]
