Music

This Is Us

On our first road trip together, Crankenstein and I visited her parents. It was a trepidatious occasion for us both. She was worried I’d flee within five minutes of seeing their house or meeting her father, and I was worried about the effect being back home would have on her mental health. For the first

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Love Is Only a Feeling

My heterosexual sister had a girlfriend before I did, not that their entanglement lasted very long. To give you an idea of approximately how humiliating that was, it helps to know that she’s more than a decade my junior. While I had close encounters of the almost-girlfriend kind in my teens and early twenties, I

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By Way of Sorrow

Though I’d always hoped to marry one day, regardless of its legality, I’d never envisioned a conventional wedding ceremony. Something quick, private and informal was more what I had in mind, exchanging vows before a judge and then grabbing a bite to eat. That was not what Crankenstein wanted for herself, so we compromised. She

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Lonely Girls

My parents had me in their early twenties, which meant we grew up together. They weren’t emotionally prepared for marriage or parenthood then, and if their upbringings had been happier we might have all been spared our fates, but that’s the way the cookie crumbled. Despite their tender ages, I was a second-chance baby, one

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Marry Me a Little

I was waiting in line to order a burrito when I sent my family a text message announcing my engagement. My sisters still find this bizarrely informal (they must’ve expected herald trumpets), but we were hungry and Crankenstein’s acceptance of the proposal had been a foregone conclusion. When we first discussed marriage, she made it

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Jesus to a Child

“Do you remember the lady from The 700 Club –” Crankenstein started to ask me a couple weeks ago, and before she finished the question, I knew the answer was no. My parents would’ve thrown our television out the window before subjecting their family to evangelical Christian programming, while Crankenstein was raised by religious fundamentalists

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The Warmth of the Sun

I don’t remember who gave me the generous gift of a shiny red “My First Sony” Walkman sometime in the early ’90s, but allowance being what it was then for an early grade schooler, I could generally afford no more than cassingles.* The earliest cassette I recall being gifted was the Oliver & Company soundtrack,

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