May 25, 2021
My Father, the Slingshot Master
For my father, the slingshot seems to offer a moment of creative flight, a brief escape. It isn’t the solution, but it keeps everything balanced.
For my father, the slingshot seems to offer a moment of creative flight, a brief escape. It isn’t the solution, but it keeps everything balanced.
Only after I left a home where there were many women who might have helped me did I realize the sari represented more than a cultural announcement.
Natural, natural, everything natural. I’m a sucker for it, Shinto-ish environmentalist and object-worshipper that I am.
Both the sandwich and I were ‘made in China’ but with an undeniable Americanness.
Everything I do is done behind a desk. And now, now? Now I can even use this Peloton. I don’t even need to run in the rain.
At detention centers, these prized possessions go straight into the trash. A devastating omen for the way immigrants are treated in this country.
To me, these never felt like steps to sprint through on the way to simulating life, but life itself.
As cliché as it’s become to say, I found myself needing this game in a way I could have never accounted for, even with all my years of fanboying.
I am no gentile, but a Jew, with chill Jewish parents, who loves the pepper-and-onion slice at Alfie’s.
It’s very calming, very methodical, very good if, say, someone you love has died, but you know the world cannot stop, and you can’t either.
There’s an irritating coyness to the language around wedding expenses: they’re not expenses at all, they’re “investments.”
All the buildings I walked by each day and thought nothing about now seemed like they contained the answers to questions it hadn’t occurred to me to ask.
If I was in the kitchen making candy, usually my mom wasn’t in there screaming or throwing a butter dish at my dad.
What do we do with language that is steeped in colonial history?
All the fashion rules I learned as a girl were informed by the view that women’s bodies are never okay as they are—they always need fixing.
Sea sponges lack heart, lungs, and the ability to move. They perform their ancient tasks because they must.
Breadmaking made me feel purposeful, instead of feeling as if I scarcely had control over anything.
When Etty wrote to herself, I heard her speaking to me, and I took her words to heart.
Most time capsules are enclosed underground, but this one faces the world.
