I learned early that a face could be a weapon. Sixth of six children, I occupied the basement of the family hierarchy – everyone’s punching bag, no one beneath me to absorb the cascade. My siblings had refined the art of passing misery downward like a bucket brigade, and I stood at the end holding…
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Nobody is white. This seems like an odd place to start, but look at your arm under decent light. Unless you’ve recently died, you will not find white. You’ll find beige, maybe with olive undertones. Pink if you’ve been exercising. Cream, sand, wheat – the cosmetics industry abandoned ‘white’ as a descriptor generations ago because…
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Visit your dentist twice a year. Sleep eight hours in an unbroken block. Floss every night. These instructions arrive wrapped in the authority of science, the reassurance of consensus, the patina of timelessness. They feel like facts discovered rather than decisions made – as though someone in a laboratory, bent over instruments, unearthed them from…
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Last September, eating a peach with chocolate peanut butter ice cream in my kitchen a little after midnight, I realized I was happy. Not in the way you realize you’ve forgotten your keys – more the way you notice your breathing only after it’s slowed. Nothing special about the combination: cold peach from the fridge,…
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