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Some recommendations! If you’d like to read a stupendous contemporary YA book about power in general, and power plays between the sexes in particular, try E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. Wow, this book got me thinking about my own relation to power. It’s a cast of fascinating characters whose stage is the… Read more »

Have I made it clear how I feel about people who always look on the bright side of life? My favorite song on the Rent soundtrack is called “Another Day.” Basically it’s an argument between two people. Roger is holed up in his apartment, bitter and sick, refusing to face the world, refusing to make… Read more »

Mind if I talk for a minute about things? My car, for one. My clutch is dying; my clutch engages about half an inch off the floor; driving with my clutch is a little like ripping the skin off the bottom of my car’s feet and then making my car walk across gravel. I’m holding… Read more »

If you could choose your superpower, what would it be? I know my answer. I’d be able to teleport– or, as Lady Elaine Fairchilde did in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, go the purple way— or, as you learn to do in your later years at Hogwarts, disapparate. Oh, how I would love to be able… Read more »

So, the other day my sister Dac (who does not need a pseudonym, on account of she doesn’t try to trick God the way Cordelia does) asked me something along the lines of, “What are foreign rights, anyway? What do these deals mean?” So I thought I’d explain it briefly, as well as a person… Read more »

I just finished Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and am now prepared to issue a formal apology to the Graceling copyeditor for my comma and semi-colon use. While reading Bronte I suddenly realized that my punctuation teachers in life were the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Charles Dickens, George Eliot,… Read more »

I’m afraid of so many silly things. I’m afraid of yellow curry. I’m afraid of my career. I’m afraid that that sharp twinge in my lower right quadrant is my appendix bursting. I was afraid of losing my revision when my house burned down, so I bought a fire-proof safe. Now I’m afraid of robbers,… Read more »

Today, I worked on my couch for most of the day and then decided to finish up my work at the beach. I was tooling down Atlantic Boulevard when a lady in a Hummer with a Jesus bumper sticker cut me off. A few minutes later, when a guy in a souped-up pickup truck with… Read more »

You know all the crazy people? What if instead of classifying them as “crazy” or “mentally ill” we just admitted that none of us make a whole lot of sense? What if instead of trying to “normalize” people who have delusions or hallucinations, we went along with it? I saw the movie Lars and the… Read more »

So, I went to a lovely performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake by the Russian National Ballet Theatre this weekend. (In case you don’t know the story: the Evil Dude Rotbart has turned a bunch of Lovely Girls into swans. One night Prince Siegfried goes hunting with his buddies, sees the swans, falls for the Most… Read more »