I was just gifted Mastering the Art of French Cooking and it's interesting to read about her weird distaste for women's spaces ("I hate groups of women") and her pretty wretched homophobia. "What she really disliked was effeminacy in men," as Shapiro puts it: www.bostonmagazine.com/uncategorize...

today our kids started a family group chat with me and my partner. it contains a nearly continuous stream of cat memes, elmo gifs, weird sarcasm, emojis of people puking or yawning, some random insults, storming off, i love yous, weird photos, and question marks. they are 7 and 10.

lego owl was too hard for 7yo so i ended up building it, but it did come out v. cute.

“what end of life guidance would you leave for your partner if you were in a coma and also carrying a nonviable pregnancy?” …surreal questions they asked me at the lawyer’s office today

I enjoyed this formulation: "The cutesy language flows in one direction only. Your compliance is demanded in the language of contracts; their failures are communicated in the language of the nursery." www.joanwestenberg.com/uh-oh-the-in...

“That said, there is A LOT of illness spreading right now - flu, strep and everything in between!” the first grade teacher wrote cheerfully

baby pigs have very beautiful eyelashes.

welcome to femininity in your 40s, says the mammogram order that my physician gave me today, or seems to say… it’s funny how something can be so banal and yet also a little bit surreal and disheveling and slightly anxiogenic and like a bundle of vaguely confusing things.

ok I'm trying to have a will (blah) and I just want to say I loathe this bit of legal boilerplate: "Whenever required by the context of this Will, the singular number shall include the plural, the plural the singular, and the use of any gender shall include all genders."

an adorable toddler on an airplane is yelling loudly at the snow falling heavily through the window: “I LIKE SNOW. MAMA! DADA! LOOK!” after a brief pause: “KEEP LOOKING!”

“I never cry when I’m sad; at those times I just pinch down into a miniature version of myself like an ailing turtle trundling off into the forest to die alone.” (confessions of the fox)

“and the soft eyes softened” (it’s just a tiny James Baldwin phrase that i liked)

in the department of obscure indie films, we just watched Chestnut (2023), a film about a bi woman in her early 20s drifting through a summer, getting awkwardly attached to the wrong people, being very open to life but also almost diffident about it, having a lot of both composure and confusion.

sometimes i look at our yard in November and it feels like those fairy tales where you are condemned to spend the night doing some impossible sorting or cleaning task, or else suffer some awful consequence

"I have dreamed stubbornly." www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/599...

i wrote a little bit about therapy and emotional capitalism for this forum my partner organized: www.madinamerica.com/2025/10/ther...

it’s funny how certain femme bodies are sometimes called “willowy” and now i’m wondering if masc bodies are ever likened to tree forms (oaken? piney? walnut?)

does anyone else find that typing on a phone is ok for basic everyday statements like “fml I’m so tired” or simple questions “when will you be home?” but that somehow it’s v. hard to write anything long and thoughtful in this input format? when i pick up a pen and a paper notebook it’s different.

my neighbors put this in their front lawn

a thing about caretaking without reciprocity… “I don’t read them [=stepkids] my own poems or share my own stories. I am realizing that I can go with them into their world without needing them to come into mine.” (Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life)

last year i brought my electric organ outside and played spooky music to the passing trick-or-treaters, and this year it occurred to me that i could repeat the experiment with a more specific theme: lullabies for the dead.

I’m reading this stretch of bookshelf as meaning that The 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work are Cruel Optimism, Black Trans Feminism, Transgender Marxism, Females, Desire/Love, the Female Complaint and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

6yo spent most of the last 12 hours loudly groaning, lamenting, honestly whining, decrying, deploring, and generally being completely against absolutely everything about the world around him. everything bugs him. even things that are arguably going fine. i am starting to lose my mind.

i woke up today feeling certain that it was a weekend and then realized it was friday, but our kids have a random day off school so idk how i'm going to do 3 hours of meetings…

alexa: "if you want, you can say: i have feedback." 6yo: "alexa, i have feedback." alexa: "ok, what is your feedback?" 6yo: "alexa, you're stupid." alexa: (various words) 6yo: "alexa, what's feedback?"

there is a tuba player randomly wandering around the graveyard at sunset playing aimless little tuba riffs.

the biggest euphoria lately is going for long bike rides and probably by 30 minutes into it my body is happy and it feels like flying and then afterwards i feel glowing for a little while

amazing trans question of the week: do i count as female for life insurance purposes? context: life insurance is less expensive for women.

for some reason i started wondering whether my kids will actually like me by the time they're grown up, or whether they will mostly feel an exasperated ambivalence towards us, one of those deep irritations that sometimes seem to smother everything.

I keep thinking of this Depression-era image of a woman stopping work for the last time: "Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then"

My kid’s soccer practice is next to a cemetery so I’m hanging out in a cemetery. Next to me is a spider. It waits motionless in the center of its web. I’m sitting beside it. Time passes. Clouds move in the sky. Aircraft noises. Traffic. Screams. Sirens. I’m watching the spider. It never moves.

my kids are like: "they say you can't fold a paper more than 7 times, is that even true?? sounds false. let's test this."

San Francisco Gay Freedom Day, 1975

"nothing that brings you any amount of joy is dumb" (–my old neighbor)

local parent friend was telling me about her colleague who was, she said, impressively blunt and terse in ways not usually characteristic of women in male-dominated workplaces. this woman was then fired.

am reading Sybil Lamb's "I've Got A Time Bomb," it is absolutely wild. even the copyright page says among other things "for external use only. DO NOT EAT."

six months later: unfortunately we were never a very great match and today i plan to explain that it’s our last session…

i'm curious if anyone has a theory of how we stop … needing certain things? like… the general case in which you start out needing x, but after some process of reflection, inquiry, adjustment, adaptation, unburdening, etc, you then discover that you don't need x anymore (or never did)?

it's a staggeringly pretty late summer day, why don't we just get to exist for a minute instead of always being supposed to do something?

i was writing something and then—i found myself wanting to insist that this is an em dash that i wrote myself, a punctuation that I love; and that i have never needed a machine to help me pause or to disambiguate dashes from hyphens. tbh i also liked reading typography books as a child.

6yo tried to have the first ever sleepover with a friend and it did not go well: the friend couldn't sleep, became scared of unknown noises and of possible ghosts at our house, and went home; 6yo was bereft.

the joy of getting to drop off your kid at a birthday party and then leave for a sublime hour alone at a coffeeshop.

i told 6yo that my partner and i were exhausted and really needed time for a nap, and in response he called us something that sounded a lot like "sleep sluts."

The precise order in which our rights are taken away will have consequences...

there are some vines that keep trying to climb up the side of the house. i keep removing them. every time i remove them, i think about how we’re getting just a little bit closer to the final heat death of the universe.

so if you are in a formerly het marriage and you have a legally recognized gender transition and gay marriage is delegalized then are you still legally married? asking for a friend

it’s funny how there are certain places where one can think and others where, given their discomfort, their interruptions, their ambient nervousness, it’s impossible somehow to form anything like a coherent train of thought besides: eep. i’m in the jury duty waiting room.

sometimes the family system seems to have this molasses quality, where we coast towards certain states, a homebody semi-lethargy, not venturing out too far or for too long: the outings take effort and often struggle; i find myself wanting us to go out for hikes or be in nature, but it becomes hard…

11 hours into my day and i’m begging my kids or maybe the whole universe to just give me like 3 calm minutes to myself

"fear is an incompetent teacher" (is a line i liked from some pretty bad scifi)