Eating Like the Romans
“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of the bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to...
Restaurant Review Writing Refuge
Today I went to write a Yelp review for the tattoo artist we went to in Buffalo last weekend. I saw my review writing counter at over 80 reviews. I decided to take a spin through my old reviews (how had I written that many?) and came across gems...
Futile Precautions
“Can I please have the organic arugula salad, with no chicken, no cheese, and a side of hummus?” I was working with an audit team in Michigan this winter. The most junior member of the audit team was taking lunch orders and I was giving him my request. The...
Am I Doing This Right?
“What would you like to try to accomplish in your sessions?” the counselor asked me. I was sitting in the counselor’s small office in Tucson, AZ. The space was packed with books, filing cabinets, and bags of psychiatric drug samples. I had qualified for two months of free counseling...
Grant Me the Wisdom
“Can I start studying for the bar exam now?” I asked my father. “No,” he replied. It was a Saturday morning in 1995: I was fourteen years old. Dad and I were driving to Price Club (now Costco). We went most Saturdays. The things we bought seemed normal to...
Breaking, Entering, and Leaving
“My mom probably won’t call the cops,” I thought as I pulled up parallel to my parents’ house late one evening in 2006. I had turned off the headlamps on my car as I got close, like I had seen in so many movies. I would have shut off...
Trying to Have a Fresca
“Can I get you a soda?” Don, my (then) father-in-law asked me. I was standing in Don’s vacation trailer, Dan (my future ex-husband) and Mike (my future ex-brother in law), sitting on a couch nearby. Dan, Mike, and I had driven down to see Don and to relax for...
Tying a Half-Windsor
I was sitting in my Prius in the parking lot of the bank I worked for in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. It was late November in 2010 and not cold enough yet to snow: the dark clouds stretching across the sky that afternoon spat down cold, choppy droplets of...
The Standard Respect of a Stranger Policy
On February 13, 2016, Basil and I were getting ready to go to the movies when my phone lit up with text messages. I don’t usually get a ton of text messages and when I saw so many popping up at once, I was worried something was wrong. It turned...
The Workouts of a Non-Athlete
For the last year, I have been consistently working out five to six days a week, for at least 30 minutes a day, thanks to Daily Burn. Of all the ways my life has changed since I moved to Ohio, this one has surprised me just as much as...