a digital junk drawer
We've been playing pinball lately. I play with the reflexes of a crockpot left on low for 12 hours. My husband is pretty good, though. The place we go recently got a new Sonic machine that he wanted to try. It's so new that all the pinball pros lined up to play it, most of them going back and forth between that and the new Pokémon machine. The machine is cool, but I confess that I don't really…
Kara is knee-deep in our favorite dumpster. She’s slinging down a cascade of flowers while I keep watch for cars. Red roses, carnations, unidentifiable mixed bouquets. I add them to the growing pile at my feet. Soon enough, the fear of being confronted becomes too much, and Kara hops out of the trash. She swipes at the raspberry jam on her pant leg as I notice a streak of slime across my shirt.…
My 12-year-old niece spent a night at my house over the weekend. We had a lot of fun, but life as a 12-year-old is wild. Like, she has a skincare routine. She complained about her eye bags. I was like, Gurl, what eye bags?! She's basically the complete opposite of me when I was 12. I punctuated the time I spent on Neopets with walks through the cemetery and burnt CDs full of emo songs I downloaded…
"I can see you're a bit older." That’s what someone posted on my guestbook recently, prompting me into a tailspin that forced me to take a sip of water and finish another row of knitting. As in, I didn’t care. Well, I cared enough to write this. But not so much that I’m loading my cart with anti-age snake oil. Because on the one hand, it's true. I was born a few days before the 1990s began. I am a…
My Neopets BFF and I went to England together in 2018. Our flight landed in London around 10 or 11 p.m., and we were hungry. Around midnight we dropped our shit off at the weird little Airbnb we stayed at, then walked to a nearby McDonald's. So cosmopolitan. As we walked, we noticed that the streets were absolutely piled with trash. As a person who sat through more than a few anti-litterbug school…
In middle school, I was the kid who never had a pencil. Like, I'd go to school and figure it out on the fly. If I did get a pencil, I'd baby it until either I lost it, or it became an unusable nub. (The one exception being the New Millennium Pencil . It was stolen. That wasn't my fault, I swear.) This was a real problem for me. I was really anxious about it, actually. I remember taking a Scantron…
Yarn: KnitPicks CotLin in a million different colors Pattern: Typical Tank by Tiffany Liew Finished: June 24, 2026 Notes: This is a knockoff of a tank top by Rachel Antonoff that I liked. (It's here , if you're curious.) The top is on sale for $179, down from $248. In other words, a price I am never going to pay for a damn tank top. So I just made my own. It's not perfect, but luckily I'm not a…
Like nine years ago, I camped at Blue Mounds State Park in southwestern Minnesota. My friend borrowed the brand-new tent of the brand-new person she was dating, and we headed on down from St. Paul. The thing about southwestern Minnesota is that it's mostly treeless prairie. Treeless prairie gets windy. On our second night, after a nice day of hiking among quartzite cliffs, a storm blew in. By…
Another quarter has passed. With it, another 90 days of searching for my long-lost pencil. The days blur; it has been approximately 8,760 days since my pencil went missing. Was it kidnapped? Did it run away from home? I cannot answer these questions. All I know is that one day I was jotting notes in 8th grade English. The next, a kid named Jerry had my pencil in his grip. Efforts to retrieve the…
Part of my husband's job is to periodically polish and wax a statue of Hubert H. Humphrey. He stands out there with a bucket and a pastry brush, and he makes Hubert shine. He doesn't understand why I find this so delightful. But I mean... He's polishing a statue! Of a dead politician! As his job! A scene rife with metaphor! You can do so much with the image of him standing out there on the busy…
Just because it's summer doesn't mean you can't wear knitwear. I say this both as a person who enjoys knitting and as a person who is perpetually cold. I also say it as a collector of Michael Simon knitwear. I insist that everyone stop what they're doing and admire some summer-appropriate knits that will help you stay cool while looking insane this summer: Beach Vest Mother of God. There's so much…
My favorite part of June is when my peonies finally bloom: I can't take credit for them; they came with the house, and I do nothing to maintain them. The unfortunate thing about peonies is that they last about five minutes, and then you just have a regular leafy green bush. Our first spring here, I tried making a peony bouquet for inside. It was beautiful, but for me the smell is so unbearably…
Aries I used to tutor in a second grade classroom with a poster of a beagle wearing a little newsboy cap. I think it was supposed to be Jack Kerouac as a dog. The poster said something like “Feel the beat of the bow-wow beatnik." For some reason, that poster always comes to mind when I sit down to write my monthly Aries horoscope. This June, that little doggy is your guiding star. It’s telling you…
My husband is into FromSoftware games. They look fun, in a punishing sort of way. I recently screamed my way through beating some early-stage Elden Ring boss. It only took, like, 90 tries. I am way too high anxiety to play these games. Plus, I panic-move the camera like a person who doesn't have eyes. Anyway, none of that matters. I have a bone to pick with the game Demon's Souls . Namely, why is…
After nearly 30 years of research, knowledge of the Furbish lexicon has grown to include more than 100 terms. The exact number varies depending on the source. This essay refers to the dictionary made available online by Hasbro as the official source for Furbish language research. Hasbro's dictionary 1 includes 134 entries. While it is likely that many more Furbish words will be identified over…
After years of painful soul-searching and careful deliberation, I have recently come to realize... My ideal career is just walking around my neighborhood picking up trash. Really. I wanna get up in the morning and take to the streets with a 10-gallon bucket and one of those trash grabbers. I already have one, and I already do that from time to time. But I want to get paid for it. On any given walk…
I went to the dentist this week. The great thing about my dentist is that they are freewheeling with the nitrous oxide. I think they cranked it too high, though. Somewhere between "Bennie and the Jets" and "Starman," I got lost and all the music started sounding like the band Beirut. Suddenly I was at a drunken parade and didn't mind that some lady was fist-deep in my mouth. I did slightly mind…
My work told us we had some "visitors" coming on one of our non-office days. They were taking photos of the office, conducting interviews with leaders, and having meetings. Weird. The day before the visit was an in-office day. They asked for "volunteers" to help clean up around the office. Breaking down boxes, shelving the mountains of books, ditching clutter. In exchange, they offered a pizza…
I watched Mean Girls the night my mom died. I’d been at her house for the entire day (she received in-home hospice care). It was utterly depressing, for obvious reasons and also because a double-wide trailer in the frozen pine barrens of east-central Wisconsin is not a fun place to be. I couldn’t bear to spend the night, so I drove home early that evening. My husband got home from work, and we…