This is a photo I took of my cousin Marie standing in a u-pick strawberry field near the coast in California sometime in late Septemeber 2010 when I visited her for a couple days after I lost my job. And this is a thing I wrote about that trip, up today on The Billfold.

Some things that, as a kid, I really really wanted my adult-self to have but that, as it turns out, shockingly, I now have very little interest in:

• A pair of Doc Martens.
• A papasan chair.
• The ability to drink and eat however much Dr. Pepper and Three Musketeers bars I wanted, whenever I wanted.
• One room in my house decorated entirely in purple and green and filled with cats.

An email from my mom has reminded me of this ridiculous thing that happened when I was fourteen.

Each fall my middle school had a “spirit week” where each day was some themed thing and we could all break dress code and dress up for class. I think this usually happened around football season and I guess was one of those things somehow meant to “inspire” “the team” although I’m not sure thirteen-year-old boys ever really need much inspiration to wail on each other. Anyway, this was a big deal because I went to a public school but we had to wear polo shirts and non-denim pants every other day of the year—yeah, I know. And this was all before the Columbine business (that happened the spring of my eighth grade year), which only confirmed the notion that kids allowed to make their own sartorial choices were doomed to shoot or be shot by their peers (I remember seeing footage of kids fleeing the school and being like, oh my gosh, they get to wear JEANS to class!). Pointless and stifling. 

But, OK: In eighth grade one of the spirit week theme-days was the pretty standard “Career Day,” on which we were supposed to dress up like whatever we wanted to be when we grew up, or at least some reasonable proxy of a respectable adult occupation. There were doctors and nurses and firemen and rockstars and stuff like that, mostly just costumey stuff. I am sure there is about a 13% overlap between What People Dressed Up As On Career Day At OMS In 1998 and What Those Peoples’ Careers Actually Are Now. I wore jeans and my favorite t-shirt. When my homeroom teacher—who was also my science teacher, who I think was only like 24 and just biding her time in the wasteland of public middle-grades education until she got knocked up (I feel relatively OK saying this because the next year she became pregnant and left and never came back)—asked me what I was supposed to be dressed as, I told her I was dressed as a writer. 

This was true but she was skeptical.

"When I die, I want to be tickled to death, eat too much, or be shot by a jealous woman."

My girl-cousins’ grandmother—theirs not mine, not the one we share—passed away this week. I remember one of them, at some point, telling me she’d said this, but I forgot about it until my cousin Claire posted it on Facebook earlier today. In the end, not one of these three things were the culprit, of course, but I love it still.

Fernbank really is so much fun. Joe and I went Saturday, our first visit since we impulsively became members a couple months ago (WHAT A WILD AND CRAZY LIFE WE LIVE, RIGHT?). The special exhibit, something about wildlife rescue, is mostly kidstuff—lots of flashing lights and colors and buttons to be slapped (I think a museum would do well to just have a permanent Button Slapping exhibit, tiny people really like that)—but Walk Through Georgia was kind of great. A little creepy, a little campy, a little outdated (many many of banks of telephone receivers you could pick up for more information about the taxidermied creatures on display and the kids were all like LOL WHUT ARE THESE, MOM), but that is the best thing for a natural history exhibit to be, I think. Also I got ogled by a dinosaur so that was cool. ANYWAY, YES, SO EXCITED FOR THE POOP.

It’s beautiful in Atlanta today, really just the perfect weather for sitting on a bench and talking about alignment charts with your husband while watching other peoples’ kids play basketball by the cemetery.

Man, IF ONLY my commute was this boring.

(Oh, I looked into where this thing came from. Kinda soul-crushing.)

(Source: magdalina)

I took this picture about one year and one week ago today, when I was working at a candy store for a few months after finding myself suddenly without a job in August. I don’t know why I never posted it, but figured today would be a fitting occasion, as I’ve now commemorated the whole weird experience—mostly in terms of my love for Darlene Love’s “Marshmallow World”—in a post for the Paris Review blog. (It’s 64 degrees and raining right now so I am yearning hardcore for last year’s amazing perfect Christmas weather but not for all the candy-slinging that preceded it.)

Went to California. It was pretty nice!

The time I went to a craft thing and Erin and I got in the photobooth and earlier Civil Rights icon Rep. John Lewis had also been in the photobooth. This is my “sorority viking” pose. (Lewis tip via Creative Loafing)