Once in a while, when I have down moment and no other commitments, I enter my sister’s name into the search box in Google. Most of the time the links I find aren’t new to me, but occasionally I discover something new about Raina (it is slightly odd that the world’s most popular search […]

No matter what the calendar actually says, when you can find local strawberries that look like that, summer is “officially” here.

There is a woman in my apartment building who only dresses in shades of purple and lavender.  She has smooth, white hair, that she always pulls back into a neat twist and whenever she plans on actually leaving the building, she wears a hat (wool in the winter and straw in the summer) and short […]

There’s been a lot of rearranging going on around these parts of late, what with the whole cohabitation thing stirring up the order and arrangement of stuff. Last Sunday, Scott and I moved twelve boxes of books from his place to mine (we moved three boxes several weeks ago). They’ve been sitting in […]

I am currently sitting on the floor of the New York 6th Avenue Hilton, my back to the windows, facing the Grand Ballroom (where, in the last 18 hours,  I’ve heard both John Irving and Alice McDermott read).  The attendees at AWP are not a particularly internet addicted crowd and so I’ve had no competition […]

I used up most of my brain power today working in the writing center at school.  We’re getting to the end of the semester and so from 4-8 pm today I sat in a chair as an array of students plopped down in the seat across from me and handed me things to read.  I […]

I’ve been wearing glasses since I was 12 years old.  My first pair had plastic blue frames that were so large that they included half my cheeks in their scope.  When I was 15, after months of begging, I finally convinced my parents that I was in desperate need of contacts.  For most of my […]

My friend Una is getting married this Saturday.  She spent years looking for the right guy, many time despairing that she would never find him.  Then, a couple of months after her 35th birthday, she spotted a guy on match.com who resonated with her.  She sent him an email, they went out and soon after, […]

I lived the first eight summers of my life in Eagle Rock, CA, a suburb of LA that is situated right between Pasadena and Glendale.  We would often come to Philly for long chunks of time during the summers to visit the grandparents, but we’d still have stretches of summer weeks in hot, smoggy LA.
We […]

Last night, around 9 pm, I started bustling around the apartment, straightening couch cushions, gathering crumpled tissues and stacking abandoned magazines. Shay, a friend who has been my roommate while I’ve been between roommates, looked up at me from her computer on the dining room table, and said with bemusement in her voice, “Oh, […]