My boss texted me this morning to say he liked the “editorial comment” I slipped into this week’s edition of our school newsletter. I had accidentally left a typo dating the newsletter: 111/01/2020. But like my boss said first, it DOES feel like we’re in month one-hundred and eleven of…

One of the things I’ll definitely miss about living in Flagstaff is the way you just “run into people you know” all the time. Like I remember a couple years ago being in the grocery store and a student shouting across the dairy aisle “Hey, Gruber! …

I forgot it’s almost Halloween. My sixth graders didn’t. A boy in my middle school Intro to CRW asked me this morning what I’d do if he shows up at my house tomorrow asking for a treat (and I’m thinking why the fuck would you do that? — then I…

A few thoughts thirteen days before the presidential election and thirteen days before I find out if the breast cancer has spread to my lungs *** The pandemic started with punk rock, and morphed to 90s Manchester and today I moved into Patsy Cline. I started, of course, with Crazy…

I am sitting on my couch drinking hot cocoa I made with almond milk in a little tiny crockpot my aunt gave me during my visit to her home this weekend. I am drinking the almond-milk hot cocoa from a cup that belonged to my grandmother, and it is not…

Maybe Ted Cruz doesn’t drink liquor. Maybe Ted Cruz doesn’t snort cocaine like Trump & Co. Maybe Ted Cruz doesn’t hit anything harder than potato salad. Ted Cruz is still a drunk, and just like all drunks sick on the darkness and the miserable quest for more money and more…

A Bill of Divorcement is the title of a film from the 1930s that I’ve never seen, but that my maternal grandmother would bring up from time to time as it seemed to have made some kind of impression on her. Now, “a bill of divorcement” is something I say…

When I first started teaching high school, I felt like this was a fall from grace for my career ambitions. My ex and I used to call Mr. Holland’s Opus a “horror film” and then there I was, strolling right into that “horror film.” I wanted to be an English…

I have not lived in an “apartment building” in nearly ten years. The last apartment I had, before I was married, was a cute little place above some stores in Milwaukee. I haven’t lived in a “complex” since 2011ish. And so this complex is a novelty to me. I like…