We got two and a half feet of snow and all she wanted to do was build tiny knee-high snowmen. Toasties: I am not the woman I once was. Today is my kids’ SIXTH. SNOW DAY. IN. A. ROW. They say the schools will reopen on Monday, but who knows? Who really knows anything anymore?
Just as I typed the above, I KID YOU NOT, it started snowing again. SURE. WHY NOT.
“I think some people are just afraid of a little hard work and standing on their own two feet, on a seashell, on a dolphin, on a nymph-queen that are all holding them up.”
The Princess and the Pea, if the Pea Were a Small Piece of Mild Criticism
Jilly Gagnon on what it’s like to write a book with your friend.
Rachel Klein, “The Other Side: Reflections on Motherhood at the Holocaust Memorial Museum”:
The last time I was in this city, I had had no choice but to bring my child with me, inside of me. The second time, I returned alone. Back in D.C. after fourteen years, I felt bracketed on one end by the visceral memory of the first time I felt, with the fullest force, how much motherhood could compel me to behave in ways unforeseen and uninvited by my previous self, and on the other by a decade-and-a-half of living with and for two humans I had created inside me—two humans who now hardly needed me in order to conduct their daily lives, to follow their interests and passions, to live as fully as they can in this imperfect world.
Friends of mine who’ve yet to start their families or who are choosing not to have children at all often remark, with vicarious excitement, that I’ll be “done” with kids when I’m in my early forties, as if it’s something one can be “done” with, something one passes through—as if the self who enters the experience of parenthood is the same self that emerges on the other side. As if there is an “other side” at all.
This was such a delightful piece of Toast and I loved it >>>> In Defense of Ariadne Oliver
When you’re a server and your customers say racist shit to you.
If Mary-Louise Parker were your girlfriend / If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend
Finally, we published four of Frankie Thomas’s delightful poems, which Toastie sarawr rightly described as “straight-up carrying the Parker torch.”
As some of you may know already, I’m editing an essay series on adoption for the wonderful Catapult and I am stoked about it. Pitches should be in by 2/8; drafts by mid-February. Please pass this subs call along to anyone you know who might be interested, with my thanks!
I’m thrilled to be guest editing an essay series about adoption for @CatapultStory! Submissions and pitches to nicole.soojung at gmail.
— Nicole Chung (@nicole_soojung) January 25, 2016
