Category: Everything

Dear Riley: Thanks for being such a good baby while I was holding you this morning. You are very chill. I like that in general in people but I especially appreciate it in you, as I was a little leery about taking you from your mom’s arms. You are so…uh, little. I really dig your…

In heaven there are no circles, only a single house. A huge bright house on the beach, with a clean white kitchen and softly worn towels and a glass bowl of shells by the door. A small stone house at the end of a long drive through the woods, nestled among snowdrifts and smelling of…

In hell there are the obvious circles: unexplained war and needless death and slow torture. You spend a lot of time in hell crouching in the undergrowth, sweating pure fear, waiting for them to come and find you. They always find you and it always hurts and no one ever knows what becomes of you,…

Historically my relationship with pants has been…well, it’s been difficult. My particular combination of small waist, big butt, and cankles is challenging at best when it comes to pants, and I have spent much of my life searching fruitlessly for the perfect pair. I wear pants all the time, obviously, but there’s always been something…

It’s been a pretty busy weekend, as I had family in town and was occupied by going to the locks and going out to dinner and going shopping and going on walks. This week is full up too, as is next weekend. I am happy to be so social and to be running around and…

In the elevator at work, coming back from lunch out by the water. With me are my coworkers Caprese, Potato, and Danish…our new thing is referring to each other by ethnic food stereotypes, isn’t that great? I’m Cannoli. Anyway, getting onto the elevator at work, joined by three rather good-looking resident guys. Cannoli (that’s me,…

Last week was pretty crazy week around my house. Not just for the usual reasons of entertaining too many strippers in too many hot tubs and running out of cocaine AND Triscuits at the worst possible moment…I mean, that’s every weekend, pretty much, for me, as regular readers of this journal will attest. This week…

I called Ashley and Tom as soon as I heard the news and they’re fine, all the people they live with are fine. That was all I cared about at first, but as I spend the day being distracted and clicking on the various news sites and not being able to care about much else…

I painted a cloudy sky on two of the walls of my room, before I moved in. First I thought it was a really great idea, and then I thought it was dumb, and now I just wish I had a camera so I could document this properly, but instead you will just have to…

I’ve kept quiet about this story up until now because I felt sort of weird about it for a while and didn’t feel like sharing, but what the hell, it’s Friday afternoon, the sun is sort of shining (which only guarantees there will be a blizzard tomorrow on the way to my barbecue), and I…

The theme of this past weekend was inappropriate temperature adaptation, also known as my thorough inability to gauge the weather and to procure and wear clothing suitable for such weather. I feel like I’ve either been too hot or too cold for days and I am beginning to contemplate stashing several full outfits for all…

Stuff in which I look pretty good · A-line skirts · Cap sleeves · Boat neck · V-neck · Long wide-leg pants · Mary janes · Black leather slip on shoes · Fitted-waist dresses · Empire-waist dresses, oddly · Dangly earrings · Little silver necklaces and bracelets · Shelf bra camis · Scarves in my…

Moving weekend went okay. The movers came at 4:15 and did everything in one load and I paid them a lot of money. Right now the living room is still full of boxes and the bookshelves aren’t set up and the old couch is still there because we haven’t picked up the new (to us)…

TThe movers said they’d be here between 1:00 and 4:00; it’s just about 2:00 and I’ve done all I can do without leaving the house or moving my stupid heavy bookcases myself. I’m just sort of sitting here on my stripped mattress in my glaringly echo-y room…or my former room, I should say, because I…

Today is, I imagine, the last day of residential tranquility I will have for pretty much the rest of June. A week from today (yeah, that’s right, Friday night, I am a rockstar) I move from a little green house to a big blue house and I haven’t even started packing yet. Tomorrow I’m going…

She’s crossed over from Switzerland to Northern Italy and is hot and tired and bus-sick. Geneva was so much fun; she and her friends went to a botanical garden and a petting zoo and a science museum with a strange exhibit of antique gynecological instruments. They went to a play and watched the news and…

Yesterday evening I went to Cupcake Royale to meet up with Treasa. I had spent quite a lot of the weekend with her at her house and had all of a sudden come down, for reasons unknown, with a medium case of cold feet about moving in with her and John (and Matt and Sarah,…

About a month ago I emailed a bunch of women I knew through various online endeavors who all live in Chicago. I don’t know. I was sort of in the mood for a little trip and my recent email activity has revealed that I knew quite a few people who live there. I was all…

I forgot to mention the last time I wrote about awesomosity the very important issue of the correlation between awesomeness and hotness. Can you believe it? Researchers have been working for years to determine what exactly the connections are, with very little success, I’m sorry on a personal level to report. People, we must get…

Saturday afternoon I went for a pedicure, lunch, and shopping with my friend Anne-Carolyn and had a lot of fun. Not only did a very cute pedicurist with amazing cleavage tell us all about her birthday party that’s going to be an 80s prom (she invited us, can you believe it?) but also I bought…

Last weekend Treasa and I walked from her house to the tiny, lovely Ballard Market. I was in the market for some absurdly expensive honey, made, apparently, by bees who feed on nothing but gold dust and cocaine, and Treasa needed a baby gift for a friend. We were gossiping about someone or another and…

It’s a waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop kind of a thing with me lately: I’m feeling really happy to be single and so naturally I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with me. This is the first time in about fifteen years that I haven’t been obsessed with one boy or another. I feel the way I did when I…

It’s been kind of a strange week. I don’t tend to live in a world of immediate personal chaos, thank goodness, so my weirdnesses are little weirdness, all adding up to make a week I am glad is over, even if nothing about it was particularly bad. So, first of all, I went to bellydance…

Friday night I went over to John and Treasa’s with some bagel bites and spanakopita, the last of the insane amounts of party food Team Costco had acquired. They have this extremely large TV in their TV room, along with eight or nine hundred types of video game thingies. I got sucked into watching some…

I like to have systems for certain things. Not important things, like going to the store or paying my bills or remembering to get my oil changed…things where it would be \\helpful\\ to have a system…but mostly things like which order the eight or nine blankets on my bed go in, or the method with…

It’s been pretty quiet around here for me this weekend. Lots of errands, lots of cleaning. I’ve gone to bed early both nights and made lots of lists and took a hot bath with a lovely Lush bath bomb that left glitter all over my tub. Pretty good. Of course, there were a couple of…

Oh, man, I’m tired. I just got out of a two-hour bath and am planning to get into bed as soon as I finish updating the internet about what I’ve been up to for the last five days. Also I have to get my laundry out of the dryer. And actually maybe I’ll wait until…

I haven’t been writing too much about politics here since the election for various reasons, the first and most important one being that I’m not terribly handy with political rhetoric, as my various attempts in that direction will prove. I much prefer to write about what I know about, which is mostly along the lines…

My thirtieth was the best birthday I’ve ever had. I am still gushing about how great everything was. My awesome friends and all the octopus paraphernalia they gave me and the food they made and the way the house looked and the people who sang and the people who didn’t sing but cheered and clapped…

One of those car-plug-in-things for the iPod and the car. I hardly use the car anymore for anything beyond going to Target but in the event of a road trip I’d like to be able to listen to my current musical taste and not that represented by the mix tapes from 1996 still in the…

Up until about yesterday I’ve felt really good about turning thirty (on Saturday! One day after Mo!). I’ve been talking about how I am well rid of my twenties, how I often feel that I sort of wasted them. In fact I don’t think I’ve spent any time at all being twenty-nine, really; I pretty…

So, now, did I tell you all that I met with a mortgage broker (broker? Lender?) Monday night at the Starbucks across the street from my bellydance class? When I wrote about my unfortunate non-experience with Bradley from Why Not Own, a bunch of people wrote me to tell me that I certainly COULD own,…

To katia: I am always going to suggest someone go to Italy…that’s just the way I am. I’ve never been further south than Florence, if you can believe it, and the next time I go I want to visit the area my family’s from (Basilicata and Puglia). I’d love to visit the vineyard that I’m…

My housemate J organized a trip to Glazed and Amazed this afternoon. This is one of those paint-your-own pottery places where you go and choose an over-priced unfinished slab of crockery and then get ceramic glaze all over yourself while eating grapes, if you are Chiara, and drinking wine, if you are everyone else in…

There’s something in the air with me lately. It’s been absolutely beautiful (if chilly) the last couple of days, with bright blue skies, as apparently Seattle and LA have switched off weather patterns for the time being. The cherry trees are starting to bloom a little…this morning on the bus I even saw some petals…

Oh, it is so COLD outside! I just got back from a great bellydance class at which I wore my awesome red bellydance skirt, which could be charitably described as so awesomely bad-ass that it has won national and international awards in both the awesomeosity and bad-assery categories, and which also involved some delicious Dilettante…

I’ve noticed that several of my journal entries lately…those that I have been bothering to write, as it’s come to my attention that I’m not posting much lately at all…have to do with my rather healthy fantasy life. When I’m not thinking about houses I seem to be off pretending to be a rock star…

Sometimes I think about owning a house. I think this is because I am turning thirty in six weeks, just one day after my beautiful birthday twin Monique. That’s what people in their thirties do, right, they own houses and talk about mortgages and scheduled gutter cleanings…after which, as Bertie Wooster would say, they have…

April 1986: During a fire drill at a meeting of my secret club, called, ingeniously, Paradise Fun Club, I elect not to jump over the side of the treehouse in full adherence to the previously-agreed-upon Fire Drill Procedure, which went something like this: make way calmly to trap door in treehouse; climb down ladder; alight…

July 1989 When my parents tell me about their decision to finally formally divorce, I weepily insist that I want to live with my father in Manhattan. He agrees, and I move up there for the ninth grade school year, into the new apartment he has to get so I can have my own room.…

Normally I am not much of one for the pleasures of the home or the satisfactions of housekeeping, but here I am sitting at the living room table, quietly delighting in this afternoon in my house. It’s very comforting to be here. iTunes has been playing all my favorite songs this afternoon and the kitchen…

I am thinking that I very much enjoyed the manicure and pedicure I got yesterday when my mom was in town (although if I had to choose between them then pedicure is the obvious winner) but I can’t get over this weird feeling of guilt I have about paying someone to rub my feet and…

So, seriously now. What am I going to do about the thirtieth-birthday tattoo thing? I know I have mentioned it here before but now I have no idea where or when in the archives so please trust me. Anyway, it was all fine and good when I was just a twenty-eight year old slip of…

The thing is, I said to her, the thing is that you can’t tell people that you don’t think you’ll ever fall in love again or even date or do anything with anyone ever again. People think you’re fishing for a compliment, like they’re supposed to go “Oh GIRL what do you MEAN of COURSE…

I am sorry to report that I am still sick. Not quite sick enough to justify skipping work, necessarily, but sick enough to have a bright red nose and to need to drink a lot of tea. I can breathe through my nose a little bit now but I fear it’s only because the mucus…

Thursday at work I was telling someone we could have lunch on Friday and she looked at me and was like, “Uh, it’s the holiday, we have off” and I was like “What? But the calendar doesn’t say…” and she was like “ But it’s New Year’s Eve,” and I was like “Okay, I believe…

1. What did you do in 2004 that you’d never done before? Got a UTI. Put soap on my green beans instead of olive oil. Sang karaoke. Got a job that actually requires that pesky MSW. Foiled my boss’ office. Wore fishnets in public. Learned the Thriller Dance. Volunteered at the polls. Got my first…

I think I should be packing right now. I know I should be packing right now and I am going to start packing in just a few minutes, but you know first I came home and had to sort through the mail and then I had to make a quick dinner (which I accomplished by…

This weekend was supposed to be a lull between the weekend before which was more like a full week but whatever, and this coming weekend, which I will mainly spend upon a series of airplanes that will convey me first to Miami and then to London. I am stressing about how, exactly, to pack for…

I have not met you yet, but I know you’re out there somewhere. You show up in my dreams occasionally, misty and hazy and just out of reach. Sometimes I think I see a glimpse of you on the other side of the street, or in a shop window, or as I get off the…

To all the people who let me scream into the phone during The Personal Incident: Thanks for allowing me to give full vent to my decibel range. You didn’t know I could be so loud, did you. Oh, you did? Okay. Thanks anyway. To my mom: Thanks for that talk in Kalamazoo, and for bringing…

Oh, bad news, y’all. I switched laundry detergents and the smell is killing me. Method Fresh Air With Bleach Alternative, I absolutely hate you. For the past four or five years I’ve been using the Pacific-Northwest-produced hippie-compliant Country Save. I could refill the box from the bulk aisle at the co-op and and bring it…

Hey, you know what I did Sunday? Besides go for a walk and hot chocolate with a beautiful opera singer and some laundry? Well, I went to Quaker meeting, for the first time in something like two years. Oh, and then I watched Saved! last night. I stopped going to meeting because I have a…

This week I’ve watched the second season of The Office because it was just in the house for some reason and then of course I got the Christmas specials via Netflix. That’s what I did last night: went to the yarn store and watched The Office. I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, green…

Big Thought: “Mom said she’s always sort of felt like an outsider, everywhere she went. I kind of have too. Is this specifically because I’m her daughter or just because I’m me? And is there ever going to be a place where I feel I truly no-doubt-about-it feel like I belong?” Little Thought: “It sure…

Last night, in my living room: Chiara: (to J) So, are we having the Holiday Party or not? J: I don’t know. Ask C. Chiara: Hey, C? Can we come in? C: [from behind closed door] No, I’m getting ready to go out. Chiara: Aw, come on! Just a little peek? C: NO. Chiara: Man,…

1) I got a new mattress. I’d begun to wonder if waking up in the morning with marks from the springs was altogether normal, so I went to the excellently named Mattress Depot and got the cheapest thing there. That’s me, making my home my refuge like they tell you to in the Pottery Barn…

This journal is one of the best and most positive things in my life, since I started it almost three years ago. I’ve learned a lot through writing it, much of it from the people who have been good enough to write me on occasion to share their reactions to what I write. A lot…

Okay. Kerry just conceded. I am bitterly disappointed. I am still just so tired from yesterday. I have written about fifteen second paragraphs for this entry, one of which started “What’s really bothering me is that no one seems to care about what I think or the issues that are important to me,” and one…

I’ve had a weirdly tight and itchy week, as if I’ve been wearing an ill-fitting 100% acrylic sweater. I seem to be going through a bout of the Vaguely Dissatisfied Blues, where nothing’s wrong, really, but nothing’s completely right either. This week there’s been the constant low-level worrying about the elections, of course, and with…

While I do believe there is a marked difference between the candidates for President this year, and while I also believe that the civil rights, environmental, educational, war, and security policies that will be enacted in the next four years will be radically different depending on who is elected NEXT TUESDAY, I don’t think my…

A couple of weeks ago, around the debates, I was feeling pretty politically crazy. The past week or so I’ve been slowly coming back down to something approximating earth. I’m still obsessively reading the liberal political blogs and wringing my hands on a regular schedule, and reading news and writing letters and making donations and…

So, instead of telling you about how my arm hurts because I got a flu shot today or about the awful dreams I’ve been having in the mornings right before I wake up or about my weekend or the fact that I’m (sadly) in the market for a gym again or about how it’s cold…

I totally have to go to sleep soon because it’s a school night for me, but over at MATH I was posting this whole long thing about tonight’s debate, some of which I’ll crib from here. I’m still sort of amped up from the whole thing, and also from my trip to Target to get…

Oh, it’s fall now in Seattle. Gray and fickle and full of volcanic activity, Seattle in the fall. I wear a sweater to work every day now, even if I have to take it off on the way home so I don’t melt on the bus. I wear socks every day and it’s dark by…

…my mom and sister; iTunes; Netflix; Dilettante hot chocolate; fuzzy socks; fuzzy slippers; the ABL, its annual housewarming party and everyone who lives there; Trader Joe’s; the Beach Club where I grew up; hominy bread from Tall Grass Bakery; dressing up; swimming; riding my bike; Jungian analysis from the point of view of the analysand;…

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT via PG Dear Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming Your state has a 30-, 29-, or 28-day advance voter registration policy.…