I don't have cheekbones

Hey guess what it's 5 great things about not wearing makeup for 5 days:

1. You can rub your eyes in comic disbelief and you’re ready to go to a waterpark at a moment’s notice. I wrote that sentence in a way that makes it seem like those two things are related but the only connection is they’re both easier to do without eyeliner.

2. Everyone thinks you’re sick so they don’t make loud noises.

3. You look enough like a child to order from the kids menu, old enough to get senior discounts at movies, enough like a boy to use the men’s bathroom if the line's shorter, and bad enough to be completely invisible. I haven't tested any of these but I have a good feeling about all of them.

4. Beyonce sings about you. There's lots of language in this, the main language is English but there’s also swear words.

5. Now it’s time to think of something to not do next week. I think it’s going to be laundry.

I'm the main character in the most boring movie ever

It's pretty lame but the main reason I wear scarves  is because when I'm wearing a scarf and I see my reflection, I think that I look like a photo my robot kids will see someday that will make them say "oh man my mom used to be cool."

Because one day I'll be really into chess, or whatever moms are into, and I'm sure I'll have gingivitis, and my kids will tease me about how bad I am at teleporting and they'll ask me what it was like to breathe oxygen growing up, but there will be photos to prove that once upon a time I was 26-going-on-35 and this is what a photo of those days would look like.

And then the second reason to wear them is look how messy my hair is here:



Just kidding, you can't tell how messy it is.

for a limited time only

It's that time again!

The flowers are dead, the air smells like worms, and the newspaper someone left out on the sidewalk now looks like a four-foot pile of gray scrambled eggs. That's right: the rain season! Which means some of our seasonal favorites are back:

Bread Confusion
Do you remember putting this piece of bread in a ziplock bag in your backpack this morning? Or was it yesterday morning? Wait, do you own ziplock bags? How did it get this flat?

Sadness Mocha
Stir a packet of sugar-free Swiss Miss into a cup of cold coffee-tasting-water and microwave on the "popcorn" setting.

Twice-burnt toast
Burned your toast? No problem! Scrape off the burnt parts and toast it a little more! Burned it again? Now it's probably super gross and not worth eating and you just ruined a $1.75 slice of gluten-free bread.

Candy you found in your backpack
Halloween lasts all year long!

Mystery Shape Treats
I wrote this one down and had an idea, and now I went to the bathroom and can't remember what that thought was. The stale candy may be messing with my short-term memory.

here are the facts

You asked so here it is: the all-inclusive list of everything I know about kosher dietary rules, and even a few things I don't know.

Anything from a pig is bad news.

Don't eat soup with bugs in it, but you can take the bugs out and then eat it if you want. Same goes for spiders. No rattlesnakes. Fish are fine. Fish with weird skeletons or armor are not fine. Tarantulas are a no-go.

Cheese has cow stomachs in it and marshmallows have horse feet in them and lots of other foods have strange parts of animals in them you didn't know about.

You can't boil a lamb in his mother's blood or milk or something I always thought was literal but it's not, it's a way of saying not to eat meat and dairy at the same time, which sounds gross at first but people do it all the time when they're eating cheeseburgers or cheese chicken or turkey ice cream or turkey yogurt. You can eat salmon yogurt because salmon isn't a meat. You can eat eggs at the same time as meat as long as it isn't pig meat and you don't cook the eggs in butter. You can eat a lemon ice for dessert after eating some non-pig non-bug meat because lemon ice doesn't have dairy, unless you like eating lemon ice with melted butter on it, like people do with popcorn. You could put an egg on top if you didn't have taste buds or shame. Eggs are not a meat or a dairy, they don't fall into the blood and milk description in any way. If you're not hungry for eggs right now you're crazy.

If you have two heads you can possibly eat dairy in one mouth and meat in one mouth, depending on where you are conjoined.

You can eat meat while wearing ice-cream flavored chapstick, but you can't eat actual ice cream for three hours after, or a certain number of hours that depends on what country you live in and whether you're lactose intolerant. I wouldn't recommend eating the actual chapstick, I don't know if it has anything to do with kashrut but it might just make you sick.

Don't eat owls. End of list.

Now you are older than before you read this

Today's the sort of day where after the third person in a row tells you how tired you look, you go to the bathroom and see yourself in the mirror and realize you're not tired, you're just not wearing any makeup.

So the joke's on you, well-meaning friends. This is just how my face always looks.

A short list for my landlord

My landlord is super great but emailing him about problems in my apartment always makes me nervous for some reason. So I’m hoping he’ll just find this here and save me the trouble.

1. The wall in the bathroom is falling. Does that make sense? I don't know how else to describe it, but it would be definitely be great if you could come look at it.

2. Also the faucet water sprays sideways instead of down. I know this seems more in the realm of a physicist than a landlord but I thought I’d tell you about it to see if there’s anything you can do.

3. One of the heaters doesn't turn on. This barely made the list because

4. the other heater won't turn off. So that sort of evens things out. Ignore this part of the list please.

5. There’s something horribly wrong with my freezer - I’ll put an entire brand-new container of ice cream in there and it's gone within hours.

6. I still notice the same number of spiders, and that’s great, but lately they seem - less spidery. Like they're not making webs with the same zeal they used to. 

7. This one involves the windows. They used to stay light until at least eight, sometimes even nine, and lately they’re not working at all. Yesterday it was completely dark by six, which seems insane and obviously extremely urgent.

8. I got new dark-wash jeans and they stained the tops of my white tennis shoes blue.

9. Sometimes, at the bus stop or in the elevator or line at the grocery store I’ll say something to a stranger but a bit too quietly, and I think my voice blends into the air around us and they don’t respond. I don’t know if they’re ignoring me or if I need to say it again louder. I think I just need to say it again louder, but I wish I knew for sure.

10. There is a cat in the neighborhood with thumbs. Have you ever seen a cat like that? It’s beautiful, I’m obsessed with it. I don’t have any photos because it’s so blurry (not in real life, just in photos) but here are some other cat thumbs.

Casting list: Portland airport

Girl in a mouse shirt and a black leather jacket.
That's me, but it's not really leather, just black plastic.

Woman at bag check.
The one who says "There are mice on your shirt" using the same tone of voice you'd use to tell someone your name.

Man who calls for backup when you set off the metal detector.
"Attention! We've got a woman in a leather jacket!" is probably some sort of airport code for "Look how cool this girl is!" but it's not really leather, just black plastic.

Woman who wipes your hands with a wet wipe after you set off the metal detector.
You set off the metal detector? No problem. Now that your hands are wet you're good to go.

hair story

So far every day of my entire life has been the part of the movie before the unpopular girl gets the makeover and is suddenly smokin' hot.

great things to do when you're sick

Growing up we were always trying to think of the perfect illness: one that made it absolutely mandatory that you stay in bed, but made you feel well enough to eat foods you like, talk, enjoy television, and maybe play table football or some other very low impact sport. I think one day we agreed on head lice but I'm still not completely convinced.

A while ago I got sick and it wasn't head lice or any other near-perfect sickness, but there was still a ton to do. Here are things you can do when you're sick, organized by great and terrible for your convenience.

Great things to do:

Hot socks magic trick

Right before you go to sleep, put on very hot wet cotton socks, then dry regular-temperature wool socks. You'll wake up with dry feet and no runny nose WHERE DOES THE SNOT GO? I have no idea.

Take the longest shower ever
If it ends it's too short.

Drink tea
I recommend licorice, peppermint, ginger, chamomile, lemon, chai, cinnamon, echinacea, kava, or hazelnut. And I don't even know what a few of those words mean.

Watch Cat Parade

Take a taxi

When I didn't have a way to get home and I was too tired to walk or take the bus I called a taxi and luckily it was a magic taxi, the warmest and darkest and most comfortable in the world, and it smelled like gingerbread, and the taxi driver was like an even prettier friendlier taxi-driving Carey Mulligan. I may have been hallucinating. Which brings me to,

Terrible things to do:

Hallucinate

Rinse your mouth with salt water
It's like tasting death!

Drink red liquid medicine

This isn't so much a blog post as a promise to my mom that I'm going to take better care of myself. 

hats and a love story

My family has one photo of my great-grandmother when she was a baby, and she is wearing the best hat I have ever seen on anyone, especially a baby. Her dad was a hat-maker, so I guess she had her pick of great hats. Being a hat maker was a thing back then, I also guess.

Today I think hats are mainly a way to tell people what sports team you like, but when my great-great-grandfather made hats, it didn't matter what sports team you liked. Hats were for everyone. In fact I've spent a lot of time looking at this photo of my great-grandmother and I still have no idea what sports team she liked. This is all true.

And then the part that isn't true, but that I love, is that one day my great-grandmother grew up and fell in love with a man with the biggest skull in the world, a man that looked terrible in hats, a man whose children would have globes instead of heads and would also look terrible in hats and would never have mysterious baby pictures wearing million-dollar hats. It was the opposite of everything her parents wanted for her. And she sat them down and she said "Listen, there are ten things in the world that are less important than love, and one of them is hats."

And she married him, and her dad came to the wedding in a hat so fantastic the other wedding guests wanted to scratch their eyes out so it would be the last thing they ever saw.

And she had seven children, each with a bigger head than the one before. That is why my grandmother's head is so big she uses a punch bowl as a fitting tool when she crochets beanies. That is why my mom's head is so big she can't ride bikes because no helmets will fit. And that is why my head is so big that when I look in the mirror it is hard to see both the left and right edges of it, and that is why I look terrible in hats, and that is why if you want to know what my favorite sports team is, you will have to ask me. It's the Minnesota Twins.

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Pictures to break up the text!