Quarantine Diary

I have a hell of a time setting boundaries. Whenever I don't say yes to what someone else wants, I feel like I'm going to get in trouble. I can remember almost every time I've refused someone simply becuase I didn't want to do something, and I carry those instances around as proof that I'm not a nice person. Since I'm stuck alone in my apartment, and my head, I've got lots and lots and lots and lots of time on my hands to try to unpack this shit. There's a reason half the tiktoks on my For You page are therapists. I remember when I was 5, my parents took me to see a dance studio and watch a class, and my dad holding me while mom asked if I would like to take lessons. I either hesitated or said no, and dad said "your mom always wanted lessons when she was a kid", and I knew immediately that it was my job to take dance lessons to make up for that. So I took dance classes for the next 7 years until I was 12, when I was fed up enough to have a fi

To be able to catch the tumult of time and your own heart, who doesn’t want that. Anne Fucking Carson, everybody.

Feeling miserable about S's diagnosis, and her upcoming birthday being a letdown because all we can do is a socially-distant drive by, and because I got the task of reaching out to her out-of-town university friends about sending in a digital birthday greeting, and breaking the news. I'm so in touch with my feelings now, I actually connect this miserable feeling with the fact that all 3 meals today were blueberry pancakes with cream cheese icing. What's for dessert when you eat icing all day? I made a buffalo cheese dip. Here's the recipe: - cheddar cheese - feta cheese - mayo - garlic - cream cheese - Franks Buffalo Wing Sauce Cut off the chunk of cheddar that has gone moldy; you're not feeding this to company, so there's no need to pretend you have standards. Use whatever quantity of each that looks good to you, but then add at least 1 tbsp more of garlic because the jar of minced garlic looked almost done so you scraped it out but now it looks li

I think there are three easy questions you can ask yourself to determine if you're pulling your weight as a coparent. 1) what meal can you make, using only the ingredients you have in your house right now, that the whole family would eat without complaint ? 2) what is the shoe size of all your children, and how close are they to outgrowing it? 3) what are the names of your child's close friends, and what activity did they last do together? Why these questions? I've never been a parent, but I have spent 15 years total in 2 different long-term relationships where I did the majority of the cooking, but also the meal planning, grocery shopping, and food prep. Even days when my partner would cook, they typically spent their time asking me what ingredients we had and where to find them. In their own home. In a room they used multiple times a day. It was fucking exhausting. This gets exponentially worse when you introduce children to the family and have to contend with dif

Our story begins in 1992, when legendary guitarist Eric Clapton released Unplugged, which included an acoustic version of Layla that swept the radio airwaves and imprinted itself on thousands of young people who had either never hear the original, or never really paid attention when it played on the Oldies station their father listened to. For background, imprinting is when an adult werewolf falls in love with an infant, or when a baby whooping crane thinks a sock puppet is its mother; it is simultaneously absurd, indefensible in the face of reason, and so heartfelt that it can’t be argued away with mere facts like “that’s a sock with googly eyes” or “werewolves don’t exist”. This tragedy of emotional attachment gone awry afflicts thousands of people every time a popular cover version of a song is released upon an uneducated public; it is not the fault of the artist! Natalie Mains bears no blame in the wrongful assumption that Landslide is a Dixie Chicks song. Your parents failed you