Excuse me while I throw this down, I’m old and cranky and tired of hearing the idiocy repeated by people who ought to know better. Real women do not have curves. Real women do not look like just one thing. Real women have curves, and not. They are tall, and not. They are [...]
It’s funny what you don’t realize you take for granted. Like short-term memory. I know plenty of people who claim they have poor short-term memory, who joke about their forgetfulness or their inattention by saying things go in one ear and out the other. Now that our new household routine with my 85-year-old BeloveDad is [...]
One of my darling chubbelinas from the Twitter posed a very good and tricky question the other day, namely, how does one deal with those poor souls afflicted with the tunnel vision and one-note conversational gambits that are the seemingly inevitable result of subjecting one’s self to a reducing diet. We all, of course, are [...]
I’m what you could call geek-adjacent. I can pass for geeky, if you don’t ask too many questions. I can sing along with the Dr. Who theme and quote liberally from Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. I read enough science fiction and fantasy to have attended, and mostly enjoyed, science fiction conventions. [...]
It says something about me, I think, that the queerest I’ve felt in decades has been very recently, when I’ve been enjoying a cup of coffee. Pride parade? LGBT conference? Hand up my lover’s skirt in the back of a cab? Explaining my life partner’s intersex status in a book for the entire world to [...]
For reasons that don’t bear explaining at this juncture, I just moved my office. Not far, mind you, just to a different room in the house. But every move requires, well, actually moving things and actually moving things requires picking each individual article up, moving it, and figuring out where they’re going to go again [...]
Modern life, in all its splendid yet sometimes confusing urbanity and variety, is full of occasions on which the correct etiquette may elude us. Surely even the most sensitive and caring of us sometimes err in our speech or actions in the presence of others. In today’s society, with its egregious tendency toward what one [...]
Well, I’ve finally gone and done it. I am not a fan of the telephone under the best of circumstances, and I resisted getting a cellular phone for a good long time, but finally I have gone and purchased a smartphone. The superficial reason for this was that my old phone — one of the [...]
I didn’t want y’all to think that it’s always roast leg of lamb around here. This morning, my breakfast consisted of a scoop of protein powder mixed with soy milk and liquid vitamin D concentrate, shaken to a froth in a Boston shaker. I commend it to you all, on those mornings when you know [...]
Having a bit of writerly bardo. Bardo, the Tibetan Buddhists say, is the bit of time between one incarnation and the next, the time when one’s soul is not tied to any particular existence. For my purposes, it’s the time between when I am actively writing one book and the next. Technically I’m not so [...]