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 […]
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 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 […]
