I am an avid thrift shopper; I have been for years. As a kid, we went out of necessity, and I lived in fear that my classmates might figure it out. One girl (popular, perfect, so, so pretty) seemed to have it out for me – she’d interrogate me about my clothes, one time forcefully…
I got my first vaccine shot on Easter Sunday, prompting all sorts of blasphemous jokes about being resurrected from lockdown, though it’ll be another five weeks (three to my next shot, and another two after that) before all those little antibodies build up. I felt fine in the aftermath, and still do now, though this…
TW: This post makes brief, passing mention to accounts of rape and assault in some of the books I read. I decided to spend 2020 reading only women authors. It shouldn’t have been a revolutionary act, but somehow, by the end, it started to feel like one. There’s a clear gender bias in publishing…
It’s February. This was the month that Seattle started to shut down, a year ago. It’s the last month that I ate inside a restaurant. We were scheduled to go to Italy that March, just as Covid was starting to take hold there. Those few weeks before we were set to leave were fraught –…
It is December 31st, the last day of 2020 – a year that has been supersaturated with so much shit and grief that it’s almost bordered the absurd. I have been to a Zoom wedding and a Zoom baby shower and a Zoom funeral, experiencing the spectrum of human existence in halting pixilation. I try…
(Above – every holiday with my family ends with people dancing in the kitchen. I don’t know why. This was a few years ago. Yes, there is box wine. And yes, my mother, at left, is a knock-out.) It’s Christmas Eve, and I am at home. I can’t remember the last time this has…
Ah, Thanksgiving! A holiday we celebrate by playing a game with our families that I like to call “And that’s how you’ve decided to live your life then?” Like Pictionary, you just keep at it until someone cries. Or – hear me out – you could just stay home for the holidays, closing the curtains…
Grief is weird when the world is normal. Everyone just goes about with their day, walking around, and sometimes the sun even has to audacity to shine, and when you are grieving, all of it feels like an insult. I told Rand once that I wished that human beings had chyrons – those little scrolling…
Last week, my kitchen sink collapsed. It fell from the bolts that held it, as though in protest, as though it, too, had had enough of the endless dishes and cooking. I managed to catch the edge of it, sharp even through my yellow latex gloves, and held it up with my fingers and…
Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury
by Geraldine DeRuiter
Available Now!
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