Spice Rack

“A constant given of the universe—only the pretty, non-average get picked, even for death.” –Elizabeth Arnott I love to people watch. I never realize how starved I am for variety until I leave my small town. Here I see the same few people every day: the guy with big muscles and tiny head, the cop…

Max needs two, TWO! Fillings next week. I watch some YouTube on nitrous oxide so I can show him what he’s in for. Wow, it sounds AMAZING. “It’s like this,” I say to Max, “Furby and oo-nai on candy clouds and rainbows!” Max and I are bilingual in English and Furbish. Which will come in…

I have a cavity. Fuck. The dentist tells me my teeth are super groovy. Like the rest of me, obviously. It’s genetic. Uh, what? Is she saying that cavities don’t just happen to super gross people who don’t brush their teeth properly? Or kids who are so terrible that the bad comes seeping out of…

The in-laws brought home a Pocket Hose. My first thought: well, that certainly won’t fit in my pocket. It looks like what guys think of when they let you know they’ve got something in their pocket. For something called Pocket it’s a pretty big hose. I dunno why I expected it to fit into my…

It’s like that meme with evil Kermit the Frog. Except it’s not encouraging me to create evil chaos. It’s like a horror movie, where the evil presence is right behind you. Or when the call is coming from inside the house. Mostly, it’s a sense that the other shoe is going to drop. Or, like…

“If I had to work with that guy every day I would punch him in the face. Not like, hard enough to damage. Just, like, a lil’ baby punch.” I knew exactly what she meant. Never had I felt so seen at work. You may have gathered there is no shortage of people I want…

I work with people from highly stigmatized populations. We work to correct thinking errors, like mind reading—they can tell everyone is judging. But not everyone in the world knows them, so not everyone in the whole world is judging. And, there will likely be a few people who are willing to look past their histories…

I got a cortisone injection in my hip—one day they’ll have to put me down like an old racehorse. For the doctor to reach my hip, I had to pull my pants down. Which I did, very demurely. Only for the doctor to come in and decided that my pants had to go even farther…

When I got home from the hairdresser the electric was out. It was unexpected and uncontrollable, so Max was in a tizzy, but being without electric is normally not nerve-wracking for me. My prepper husband was listening to the hand-crank radio. “I’m trying to see what’s going on. It might be the internet. Cyber terrorists,”…

A warning about Mom Rage I had never really thought of myself as a Mama Bear, particularly not As Seen on Facebook. As in, “try to mess with my kid and I’ll show you what a mama bear really is”! I certainly have never felt the desire to buy a Mama Bear t-shirt, not when…