For my grandparents’ 90th birthday, we got them Genographic Project kits, which analyze your DNA to determine where your earliest ancestors came from. In order for the science to work, they have to take two saliva samples eight hours apart with the provided swabs. Which brings me to my punchline. I now have the title [...]
Archive > 2010
MFA writing programs: an exposé
In May I completed my first year of a two-year MFA fiction program, and so concluded the best and worst year of my life. If someone close to you has the nerve to die, I recommend surrounding yourself with sensitive writer-types. They will email you with words of comfort, they will hold your hand when [...]
Heartwarming story about bird shit
Birds have shit on me exactly three times since my dad died: once in my hair when I was on my way to bereavement therapy, once on my suitcase when I was traveling between New York and Virginia, and once simultaneously on me and my poet friend, who lost his father two weeks ago. Yesterday [...]
Thank god I can’t get fired from the Internet
I’m only a part-time employee, but still.
Here’s what happened on Friday afternoon: I was waiting on the subway platform, and a wannabe rapper was freestyling a few trash cans down. For a while he maintained a decent flow, then he got stuck. He couldn’t come up with a verse to rhyme with “I’m unemployed right [...]
Beforehand
I want to write about the hand I saw in the subway car, how I was sitting in the corner of the train and the five fingers crept around the mirrored surface of the car in an odd, backward way. I remember that the nails were wide and the fingers themselves were thick and sturdy [...]
My Dinner at TGI Friday’s
A few weeks ago I went to Penn Station at 8pm to meet my mom’s midnight train from Virginia. I was excited about spending four hours under Madison Square Garden, exploring its subterranean wealth of eating and drinking options. I’ve been to some tasty restaurants in Manhattan, but you don’t truly know a city until [...]
My only job tonight is to write a blog post
That’s the first indication it will turn out badly. The second indication is that I have nothing to say. Here is what time is doing lately: inching, edging, creeping, lurking. It is twisting in my back. It doesn’t spare me, it doesn’t take pity on me. It doesn’t let me sit by the side of [...]
Playing the grief card
Acceptable ways to play the grief card:
1) Getting an extension on a due date at school.
2) Taking some time off work.
3) Cursing at the bank rep who keeps calling to harass you about a $5 fee the day after the service.
4) Eating apple pie for breakfast with impunity.
5) Refusing to change out of [...]
Eff you, grief handbooks
It seems that I am directing my normal, healthy anger toward the grief handbooks which are trying to teach me that my anger is normal and healthy.
On the death of my father
My dad liked to read my blog. In fact, the last time I saw him he bragged to my mom that he had “made it onto Wistar’s blog!” (I’d recently written a post about our mutual glee regarding the Dictionary.com snafu.) Dad also played a crucial role in the One Star Watt Turtle/Frog/Spider Saga of [...]