Category: The Key Girls
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Easy And Ordinary
The year’s almost half over, and I have been spending it about as you’d expect, doing the things you’d expect I’d do. I’m working what seems like a lot but is still really only nine to five, with some travel thrown in. Because this job is only for a year—only eight more months, now—I’ve been…
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Amazing Thing
I don’t know why I was thinking about this the other day—I was at the rockpools at Island Bay with some buddies after doing Frocks On Bikes—but for some reason I had this very visceral memory of something we used to do in my secret club I was in as a kid. It was called…
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Wednesday In Miami
Feel free, my mom said as she was driving me to the mall to meet my best friend, to tug my coat if you feel like I’m treating you like you’re thirteen. I don’t mean to, honey. It just happens sometimes. She pulled over at the light and I hopped out, saying, Mom, it is…
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My First Kiss
My first kiss was when I was sixteen years old, and was with my best friend’s cousin on her living room couch. I had just beat him at Tetris. The end. No? Background? Okay. Let’s start with the “sixteen years old” part and get it right out of the way: I was a very late…
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Dear Natalie
Girl, since the last time I wrote one of these, the sheer number of babies-of-friends has well-nigh exploded. Your Aunties Marah and Manya have each had second children in the interim (sorry I didn’t get right on those entries, Luke and Kayla), and then a bunch of my non-Key-Girl friends had kids too, one right…
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Just What I’ve Always Wanted
It’s been a pretty normal week for me. Low side of normal, maybe, one of those weeks where I had plans to do stuff but they fell through so I’ve made my own dinner every night and even watched a little TV with my housemates. Treasa and I discussed birthday party plans yesterday evening, when…
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The Cognitive Dissonance Is Breathtaking
It is a little known fact that a totally hardcore thing to do is to get home from your trip to the East Coast at three-thirty in the morning, go to work late, leave work early, go to two grocery stores because heaven forbid you go a week without your organic sweet potatoes and your…
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Layers Of You
I’m all packed for my trip and just watched the last episode of my netflix. I ate dinner hours ago and would sort of like to eat a new, completely different dinner. It’s freezing cold in the cloud room at the moment; I am writing this bundled up in a sweater under a down blanket…
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We Could Be Sisters
Like many weekend trips I take, my Easter trip to North Carolina to visit Amy and Alan (and little baby Lily!) was mostly about hanging out. We got up and had breakfast and sat around and talked and watched movies and sat around and talked and then maybe got out of our pajamas in time…
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London Pictures
I’d just like to preface these pictures by mentioning that y’all know I’m terrible with the camera, okay? The one I have is a hand-me-down and I’ve never quite learned to use it and also the batteries apparently have this really short life so I spend a lot of time pointing and clicking and then…
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Mind The Gap
I’m writing this from Ashley’s flat (her flat!) in London. We just got back from the Victoria and Albert Museum, where one of the guards laughed out loud at my attempts to try on a kimono at the try-on-a-kimono station right by Textiles. We very much enjoyed the medieval rooms and the banks of cases…
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Dear Lily
Dear Lily: I think you have such a beautiful name. Your mom called me Friday afternoon to tell me you had FINALLY decided to grace us all with your presence and I was so glad to hear you and she and your dad were all okay. You’re my thirdlittle Baby-Of-Friends in the past eighteen months.…
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A White (Mice) Christmas
My mom brought home her school’s white mice for the holidays. They’ve been sleeping all day but got very industrious at about ten this evening. In general I am not a fan of things that live in cages, nor things that have red eyes, but I sort of like them anyway. I’ve been experimenting with…
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Dear Jacob
Dear Jacob: Hey! Hi! Yesterday afternoon when I got home from doing errands downtown I had the following message on my machine, intoned in a deep, manly voice: “Eight pounds, seven point six ounces, 21 inches. Catch you later.” I was momentarily confused. Was it Dilettante Chocolates calling to reward me for my devotion to…
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High Gear (For Me)
Okay. I’ve been up since about three thirty this morning, so we’ll see how I do here. It’s been a busy weekend, much in contrast to my last several weekend, when I was all listening to KEXP for hours on end and sewing multiple projects and sighing little sighs and talking to the cats a…
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Babble
Dear Landon: I just got a message on my machine from your Auntie Ashley telling me that you were born today. I’m this close to jumping on a plane to Miami right this second, but between you and me, I don’t really have the cash right now, and I’m coming out there in six weeks…
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Your New Year’s High Resolution…
…is to see pictures of me! Right? Okay! Remember that kljhdofih lhfougwed I got Carl for Christmas? It was a digital camera. See my smartness here, folks? I got him a camera and now he’s going to use it to take pictures of me. All part of the plan. Go ahead and click on the…
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Five Feet Twelve
Here’s part of a song I wrote (and performed!) for My Friend Manya’s wedding rehearsal dinner almost four years ago. Pretend her last name is “Spleen, ” okay? It isn’t, but it rhymes with spleen, and the song doesn’t scan without it: Oh, she has blue eyes and she has blonde hair She can drive…
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Little Known Facts
Well, it’s time once again for everyone’s favorite feature here at Ampersand! Yes! A birthday entry! And today it’s Ashley’s turn! Happy 27 years old, Ash! Now, I already told you about her wedding, and I’ve mentioned her several other times in this little journal. So you know that Ash is a Key Girl. You…
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Anniversaries I Forgot
Warning: This is long. This is about friends and their weddings. With details. If you don’t like either or both of those things, well, check back in a day or two, when I surely will be ranting and wailing about being jobless, or how my tummy hurts, or how it won’t stop raining in Seattle.…
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This and That
One of the nice things about keeping a little online journal that only your friends and your mom reads is that you think about stuff you want to write about all the time, thinking what a good entry that would make and how funny it would be and so on and so forth. But the…
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The Best Stuff We Did
In what I hope will become a tradition here at Ampersand, I’d like to write another Friend’s Birthday Journal Entry. Quick, whose birthday is it today? Who’s turning 27? That’s right, it’s Marah! Happy birthday Marah! Okay, remember when I wrote an entry about Amy I said that there was a group of girls with…