It’s funny, the things that finally set you off. Like, I’ve always presumed that I was a relatively hinged person, but here I am, utterly unhinged. For some of you, this will be unsurprising. Some of you will be thinking, “Geraldine, YOU WERE NEVER HINGED. YOU HAVE FEWER HINGES THAN A SLIDING DOOR.” And I…
(TW: this post discusses online abuse and includes screencaps and discussion of graphic, misogynistic, homophobic, and generally just horrifying language.) I’ve been studying online harassment for a while now. I find myself a case study more often than I would like, and when I present on the topic, my slides are often screencaps of abusive…
My husband turned 40 at the beginning of July. I wanted a Bacchanalian celebration, cake and lights and streamers and swarms of people, forgetting entirely that this milestone wasn’t about me. The realization would hit me eventually, before too much planning had occurred: he didn’t want a big to-do. Nor did he want, he insisted,…
Above photo: Between Two Knees (2019): Wotko Long, Rachel Crowl, April Ortiz, Derek Garza, Shaun Taylor-Corbett. Photo by Jenny Graham. Minutes before the curtain rose on the night we saw Between Two Knees, my husband Rand received a text from our friend Shaun, who is in the show. “Sorry in advance,” Shaun wrote,…
It has been two years since my memoir came out, and the reality of that dream coming true has both sunk in and managed to become surreal. Sometimes, I need a reminder that it all actually happened. And then someone will mention it to me, or email me to tell me that they just finished…
Ten years. It’s been ten years since I started this blog. Ten years since Rand accidentally named this site because he misheard me when I suggested “The Everywhere List”. Ten years since we registered the domain. A decade of writing posts – some good, some utterly embarrassing, some very, very outdated. The wormhole created by…
Recently my Twitter replies were doused in gasoline and set alight. It’s been both somewhat alarming and interesting. (Uncontrollable, raging fires usually are.) I wrote this tweet in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Seattle after I’d had a day. An exhausting, emotionally draining day filled with some of the more intense stuff you…
The problem with any writer who happens to experience that rare, fleeting phenomenon known as “external validation” is that for a few moments, we go a little mad. Which is to say: we start believing our own hype. And for a writer, truly, what greater madness is there than believing in yourself? Don’t get me…
I graduated high school in 1998, either (depending on which arbitrary marker you choose) the last of Gen-Xers or the first of the Millennials. Like so many of us who came of age in the 90s, Friends was a delightful, aspirational glimpse of the future. (I had no perspective to realize that my friends of…
Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury
by Geraldine DeRuiter
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