– There are moments of my life that are so perfect, so ridiculously wonderful, that eloquence fails me. You’d think that those would be the times when words would come most easily. But when you are surrounded by poetry, it is incredibly hard to create more of it. You simply look around, stupefied, and think,…
– It’s funny how quickly the bizarre becomes normal. How things that are strange and weird become familiar and every day. So that after a while, we forget that they’re even all that strange, until someone else points it out to us. When we first moved back to Seattle from Florida, nearly 20 years…
– Do you ever have moments of extreme clarity? I’m not referring to those times when the skies above you are cloud free, or when your skin is looking absent of blemishes, almost to the point of vulnerability. No. I live in Seattle, and I eat lots of cake. My clarity does not manifest itself…
– After my brain surgery, I had trouble accepting that I was unchanged. “Do I seem different?” I would ask Rand, time and again. “No,” he’d reply. “Baby, you are exactly the same.” And I’d stare at my reflection in the mirror, at my steroid-induced moonface, and say, “But I look different.” “It’s not how…
– I was talking recently with some friends, and they were telling me about a new phenomenon in the processing of coffee beans. The fad involved coffee cherries that are passed through the digestive track of a civet cat (mammals native to the islands of Java and Sumatra). The cats can’t process the beans themselves,…
– I was recently talking to someone close to me about marriage. She told me about Buddhism, and her husband, and their shared views on infidelity – and how the damage it does is like throwing a stone in a pond. The stone causes a splash on impact, but it also causes ripples to…
– I’d never heard the term “skinflint” before visiting Dublin. Truth be told, it sounds rather dirty. Like, “Did you hear about Janine? She caught skinflint while riding on the subway.” Or, “I’ve heard he’s done a lot of things in the past that he’s not proud of. Like, you know … skinflint.” Or, “Be…
Walking down a crowded street on a rainy night in Dublin, we heard the distinct sounds of people watching an outdoor movie. I can’t specifically say what the noises were – it’s strange how despite the thousands of films in existence, and the myriad of soundtracks and dialogues and moods expressed therein, they all start…
– I walked into Crackbird with a bit of trepidation. It’s an immensely popular restaurant in Dublin, and they specialize in fried chicken – as well as grilled and roasted – but fried is their signature, and the name of the restaurant is a play on its apparently addictive qualities. They want you to describe…
Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury
by Geraldine DeRuiter
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