I’ve just gotten my second vaccine (the technical term: a full vaxxiccino) and have been reading the CDC’s recommendations for safe summer activities for the fully vaccinated. I’m two weeks ahead of my husband, something I hold over his head because he has better abs than me and is just a better person all around,…
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My city feels strangely still right now. I normally hear the sounds from the elementary school nearby, or people walking their dogs, the swish of cars driving by on the street. But it’s oddly quiet at the moment, the only sound the squawking from a few irritable crows whose life mission is to make sure…
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My beloved wrote a book. How it came to be was radically different from my own path. When I wrote a book, it became a job, it became the thing I was doing because on a daily basis, there’s not that much else that is asked of me. But there are always things asked of…
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I spend too much time on Twitter. And, frankly, it’s awful. Every day is like wading through a sea of poop to try and find a cupcake, and even when you find that, it’s like, “Well, I can’t possibly eat this cupcake. It’s covered in poop.” As a writer, Twitter becomes a sort of necessary…
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Being a writer means that you’ll never have a shortage of criticism, whether it is offered up to you in heaping scoops of vitriol from faceless masses on the internet, or you gather it yourself from your never ending well of neurotic self-doubt. Hooray. Add “being a woman” into the equation and your cup overfloweth.…
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I was doing a radio spot a few weeks ago and the interviewer noted that my blog and my Twitter feed had become increasingly political in recent months. I laughed and noted that the same was true for nearly everyone I knew. Over the course of a year, I went from tweeting things like…
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In the center of Valencia sits the Palacio del Marqués de Dos Agüas (the Palace of the Marquis of … Two Waters? Wait, is that right? I’m basing this on my high school Spanish, which also inadvertently caused me to proposition someone when I was 16). The building – an ornate and sort of gaudy mansion…
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Two exciting things happened yesterday. The first is that I signed my contract for my book deal. Which means my book is actually getting published, and the last few months haven’t been some weird fever dream. (Though I suppose that this could all be part of the fever dream, too. At which point I’d just…
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Most travel memoirs involve a button-nosed protagonist nursing a broken heart who, rather than tearfully watching The Princess Bride while eating an entire 5-gallon vat of ice cream directly out of the container (like a normal person), instead decides to travel the world, inevitably falling for some chiseled stranger with bulging pectoral muscles and a…
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