Early on New Year’s Eve Day, 2021, my best friend jokingly asked “Are Muriel and Crankenstein drunk yet?” I replied with a photo of Muriel licking the undersize dog bed in my office as I attempted to work. After scrutinizing some of the titles on my bookshelves, he wrote “I assume the copy of Being …
There are times in every relationship when you assume an ill-fitting role for the sake of your partner. Crankenstein didn’t enjoy prying a partially eaten mole carcass from the jaws of our beloved (and disgusting) dog, who ripped it from the earth right in front of us with her fangs a few years ago. But …
I’ll elaborate on this later in the week, when I have more time. But for now, try to imagine me not on this puny, wildly insufficient stepladder, but scaling a regular construction ladder on the landing pictured below, straining — my left hand and leg tremoring — to reach a smoke detector at the end …
On the first Christmas Eve that Crankenstein and I spent together, before she went to a midnight church service while I hung out with her cat, we stopped by my parents’ house for dinner. It was a casual, secular affair attended mostly by atheists and Jews — my parents, siblings and maternal grandma — and marked …
“Suppose you listen to me for a change?… I said listen to me! I’m tired of being pushed around. Tired of being told what to do. Tired of writing your god-darned articles. Tired of dancing to everybody else’s tune. Tired of being told whom to marry. In short… I’m tired!” That Barbara Stanwyck tirade from …
In which I explain the fate of the Golden Girls episode guide while maligning content-scraping bots and plagiarists.
My mom and her sister took turns having kids in the 1980s: I was born in ’83, my brother in ’84, and cousins followed in ’85 and ’86. Together we spent our childhoods running around our grandparents’ house, with the exception of a cousin we’ll call Brandon, who rolled. Born without use of his legs …
There are people who check in here when I take too long to update Cranky Lesbian, possibly worried — or even hopeful — that Crankenstein finally murdered me.* If you’re one of ’em, hold your horses, a new review is (hopefully) coming this weekend. I’m just (temporarily) up to my ears in bullshit right now …
In which I share a Hanukkah memory and discuss whether Muriel’s being raised Jewish (and reveal her real name).
I found an old Modern Library edition of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams at a book fair when I was 11 or 12, its dust jacket tattered but mostly intact, and purchased it with great excitement, convinced it would unlock insight into my unconscious that might allow me, perhaps, to finally understand myself. That …