Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality.
Sloane Crosley
I can't see the forest through the trees, except the trees are people.
I'm a summer baby, so I usually have my birthday as a good summer memory.
Ah, the power of two. There's nothing quite like it. Especially when it comes to paying utility bills, parenting, cooking elaborate meals, purchasing a grown-up bed, jumping rope and lifting heavy machinery. The world favours pairs. Who wants to waste the wood building an ark for singletons?
I like to try to do a little work before I do anything in the morning, even if it's a paragraph.
I don't do emoticons unless I'm making a big deal out of them. I'll type out, 'This is so amusing it makes me want to grin in pixels.' And then do it.
The trick to scrambled eggs is to remove half the milk from the container and shake what's left as hard as you can, like a cocktail shaker, before you whisk it into the eggs.
At the end of each year, I sit on the floor and go page by page through the old calendar, inking annual events into the new one, all the while watching my year in 'dinner withs' skate by. When I'm done, I save the old calendar in the box of the new one and put it with the others on a shelf.
The year most of my high school friends and I got our driver's permits, the coolest thing one could do was stand outside after school and twirl one's car keys like a lifeguard whistle. That jingling sound meant freedom and power.
There's an 'Everything must go!' emotional liquidation feel to the end of your twenties, isn't there? What will happen if we turn thirty and we're not 'ready?' You don't feel entirely settled in any aspect of your life, even if you are on paper.
I love to bake, so I made vanilla bean and blueberry muffins for sick hospital children. Just kidding! All of that is true except the sick children part.
Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres, I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat, sleep, read, watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards.
I use Ole Henriksen eye gel when I think of it, and go for facials when spa gift certificates appear as a professional thank-you or in a gift bag. Once ensconced in a facialist's chair, I let myself be coaxed into all sorts of treatments, because I'm there already, so why not?
Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights,' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'
I used to think that nails-down-a-chalkboard was the worst sound in the world. Then I moved on to people-eating-cereal-on-the-phone. But only this week did I stumble across the rightful winner: it's the sound of a baggage carousel coming to a grinding halt, having reunited every passenger on your flight with their luggage, except for you.
Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied.
The world I describe is about how people live now. It's not about zany people with unlimited, inexplicable funds in an apartment somewhere.
I was the youngest of my entire family so you are tap-dancing to try to get the attention of your older cousins. I really hit my social stride in 6th grade, but before that I was a pretty big dork. You learn how to be amusing and how to work for it.
Air travel is the safest form of travel aside from walking; even then, the chances of being hit by a public bus at 30,000 feet are remarkably slim. I also have no problem with confined spaces. Or heights. What I am afraid of is speed.
I was diagnosed with a severe temporal spatial deficit, a learning disability that means I have zero spatial relations skills. It was official: I was a genius trapped in an idiot's body.
There's just no concept of layering a thick-sleeved sweater under a coat in L.A. A coat is more of a gesture than a necessity. You know, in case the temperature goes down to 55 degrees.
I love giving people advice on what to do with their books, but I don't really know how a Kindle Single gets covered.
A pet store is a celebration of dogs' existence and an explosion of options. About cats, a pet store seems to say, 'Here, we couldn't think of anything else.' Cats are the Hanukkah of the animal world in this way. They are feted quietly and happily by a minority, but there's only so much hoopla applicable to them.
I have a disproportionate amount of faith in the goodness of the world and that everything will actually work out okay.
Alaska is what happens when Willy Wonka and the witch from Hansel and Gretel elope, buy a place together upstate, renounce their sweet teeth, and turn into health fanatics.
Unless we're talking about old-school, witchcraft-trial violence, can we please phase out the phrase 'girl crush?' While we're at it, if we can axe 'like, total girl crush' unless Total Girl Crush is the name of a fizzy soft drink, in which case I'll take two, thank you.
For me, nothing brings out my 'born yesterday' idiotic qualities quite like having my photograph taken.
For me, titles are either a natural two-second experience or stressful enough to give you an ulcer. If they don't pop out perfect on the first try, they can be really hard to repair. Or, worse, if the author thinks they pop out perfect, but the publishing house does not agree, it's difficult to shift gears. And then? Then you go insane.
The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.
I attended an extremely small liberal arts school. There were approximately 1,600 of us roaming our New England campus on a good day. My high school was bigger. My freshman year hourly calorie intake was bigger.
Because I am a horrible flincher, contact lenses are not an option. I'm always envious of contact-wearers. There are endless reasons to take off one's glasses during the day and, as I have grown older, what I don't see has become increasingly pronounced.
Everyone has been in a social situation where you say something and it goes unnoticed, then someone else says the same thing and everyone laughs a lot. You learn how to be more creative and whacky and amusing.
I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.
The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.
It's funny. People often compare me to other humor essayists. They're usually quite nice comparisons; I will accept those gladly. But I am always sort of appalled at the idea of being lumped with other, more chick-y female writers. And the truth is probably that neither comparison is accurate.
Are there moments when I see unrequited crushes or ex-boyfriends slow dancing with their dates and kind of want to stab myself in the spleen with a salad fork? Yeah, sure.
I would gladly have accepted a heaping spoonful of nepotism when I got out of college and was looking for a job.
In general, I prefer to record all traumas and save them for later, playing them over and over so they can haunt me for a disproportionate number of weeks to come. It's very healthy.
There's already a marriage clock, a career clock, a biological clock. Sometimes being a woman feels like standing in the lobby of a hotel, looking at the dials depicting every time zone in the world behind the front desk - except they all apply to you, and all at once.
I can say with a solid degree of authority that I am a selfish person. I spontaneously forget the names of more people than not, unless I want to make out with them. I will take the last square of toilet paper off the roll without thinking twice. I tip taxi drivers so poorly I'm amazed none of them have run over my foot while speeding off.
They say it's not the snoring itself but those anxiety-packed moments in between snorts. It's the waiting for the nasal passages of the person lying beside you to strike again. And strike it always does. In the dark, almost against your will, you produce that special glare reserved for people who cannot control their own behaviour.
For a long time I wanted to draw, but I could never get the proportions right. My still life sketches were the artistic equivalent of someone who has misjudged the space constraints of a postcard, the handwriting shrinking uncomfortably at the bottom.
As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day.
I think that most New Yorkers would object to calling me a New Yorker. I didn't grow up here.
Going to a museum is one of those inexplicably tiring things. You're not actually doing anything, more shifting your weight from room to room than walking. And yet it is one of the more tiring things one can do, no matter how thrilled you are by the exhibits.
Yes. I am writing full-time. Which is strange. It feels like not having a job.
The Queen of Crafts herself, Martha Stewart, and I have the same birthday. I prefer to think it's the glue-gun wielding, perfect-tart-producing Martha and not the copper pan-throwing, jail-going Martha. But I suppose if I am going to share a calendar square with some of Martha, I have to share it with all of Martha.
Let me put it this way: I don't feel as settled as I look. I think that's true of everyone, probably. Except for Beyonce and Jay-Z. I don't think they wake up and think, 'Ugh, when's it going to work out for us? Why can't we catch a break?' Aside from them, I'm pretty sure everyone's life feels a lot less intentional.
You know what they say: 'Why sit at a table that doesn't have key lime pie on it if you don't have to?'
Out of all artists, authors are the least trained for the spotlight. Wanting attention isn't a requisite part of the package.
