We are sitting in a 7–11 parking lot. At 2:52 on a Friday. Sean and I in our usual spots; him driving, me navigating, in a dusty Camry where the floor of my seat is covered in hospital discharge papers, and not just from today. This has been a bad…

My first real memory of Los Angeles is moving here. It was 105 degrees in August and my brother and I got stuck on the 5 so long he had to abandon the car to pee in a bush near Lost Hills. We moved into my apartment at 2 in…

Lesbian dance theater. Medieval basketweaving. Menstrual poetry. There’s a very simple reason why the conservatives seem to all use similarly cadenced insults about student loans, and it’s not one I’ve seen discussed very much in the last weeks absolute tantrum over a minimal amount of loan easement, so let me…

Everyone with a passing romantic interest in boys has a First Boy. The First Boy isn’t necessarily your first love or your first crush or the first musician you write fanfic about. …

Males like Maximum. They like words on paper. On the couch, they are not perpendicular, but forward. Males have calendars, many beautiful calendars that make them cry like Brett Kavanaugh. But they do not cry, for that would disturb their skew. MALES MUST SKEW. They must have script in hand…

Women shouldn’t talk too high. It’s a documented fact that that annoys some people. They sound like little girls. But they also shouldn’t talk too low. That’s weird. Then they sound like men. They shouldn’t sound like men. Be neither a chihuaua nor a St. Bernard, ladies, aim for the…

Well-behaved children of the 1980s were a rarity on television but maybe not in life, but few understand this moderated, charming behavior was the result of carefully structured bribery. It’s not that the well-behaved didn’t have the same impulses to turn the chaos faucet on full blast, it’s that we…

The most beautiful stretch of road in the continental US is alongside Asilomar State Park. It curves and bends gently along the lip of the Pacific Ocean, past a dozen or more tiny coves rimmed with sandstone. Look closely and you will see a harbor seal, poking her silky nose…

There’s a joke on twitter about how dramatically over-important we think we are, yet here I am with 1200 words announcing I am TAKING a TEMPORARY BREAK from Twitter. I am doing it because I am taking my first real (isolated, away from others, still working) vacation in two years…