The Pale Blue Egg

In my family, we call it a birthday month. For some, it starts on the first day of the month of our birthday, like my mom whose birthday is the last day of June. For others, like me and my sister, it starts a full calendar month beforehand. Our birthdays are in the first weeks of our months. It simply wouldn’t be fair otherwise.  We have a groupchat where we say goodnight every night. My dad started it with my sister and me and my grandma after my grandpa died. My mom found out about it months later and demanded to be added. But it’s like she doesn’t get the rules all the way. She was on a stretch for a while where she sent a buck-tooth glasses-wearing emoji every night, while we were all sending “Goodnight, I love you”’s. It was almost like she was protesting being left out. Which is fair. But it’s been three years. In the groupchat, we are expected to keep an eye out for impending birthdays and wish the special person a happy birthday month, week, and day. On the day, we ca...

It ended up taking five hours. I had an appointment and everything. It turned out that a two hour appointment window meant that I could show up and they would get to it when they got to it. This is also how it works without an appointment. The receptionist told me this like she knew I was about to yell at her. I vowed, consciously, to prove myself a good girl.  I chose Midas because when I googled “cheap oil change near me,” I got an ad for a $17.76 oil change. I knew that they would tell me what they always tell me: I need the expensive oil. I always cave and then promise myself that I will find out later if they are lying to me. I think sometimes they take advantage of me and the way I spill my guts about knowing nothing about cars. I make myself a target. I cannot help it. My strategy at an auto shop is to just say, hey I don’t know shit about shit, can you please do what you think you should do, and I’ll trust you and pay you whatever you tell me to? Not today. Today, my ...

Did you know that a wedding dress has to be hemmed? They make them long on purpose so that somebody else can get paid to chop it to your exact right length. For your fitting, you will need to bring your exact right shoes and know the exact right type of floor you will be standing on. The seamstress will have an oxygen tank and make you stand in the front window of her store. You will feel--and will quite literally be-- on display. Women coming in and out will smile and tell you you look beautiful even though you are a mess from teaching kindergarten all day.  In addition to the dress and the alterations and the shoes, you will also need a special bra that shapes your waist and hoists your sagging tits back a decade. You will put this all on your parents’ credit card, with their semi-blessing and a constant reminder that you are cut off the second the judge signs your marriage license.  Did you know that you can ask to put your wedding dress in the “Captain’s Closet” when...

In The Before, I cut my own hair anyway. My hair is a boring brown and grows past my shoulders. It’s not that hard to just snip the ends myself. And it’s much cheaper. At my last haircut before I took matters into my own hands, the hairdresser was unbelievably young and kept putting her blue metallic scissors in her mouth.  I don’t have hair scissors like everyone online says you should. I have fabric scissors that I got with a coupon at Joann. When I feel like it, I play hairdresser, dropping my uneven tips into the plastic garbage can that I prop up in my sink.  Now, in The After, people are obsessed with the idea of cutting their own hair. New listicles pop up every day, proffering the sweet, sweet schadenfreude of pandemic haircut disasters. I spent ten real minutes of my actual life watching a video of a teenage girl cut her hair in big chunks down to her scalp. (I envy her.) I told Connor that if he wakes up next to a bald-ish version of me, that he should know it is...

I installed our new air conditioner this morning. The more details I include, the less impressive it sounds. It’s portable, it even has little wheels, and I made Connor carry it up the stairs for me. I “helped” by putting one hand tenderly under the bottom corner and asking the whole time “Are you sure you’ve got it?” It is not a window unit, so it wasn’t even a balancing act. I really only had to follow two and a half pages of directions--with pictures-- and click a couple of plastic pieces together so that the hot air could be pumped out of our window. The only tool I needed was a single screwdriver, which I immediately dropped out of the second-story window. Connor asked where I was going and laughed very hard when I told him that I had to go outside to get our screwdriver. He said I could have killed somebody, and oh boy, trust me, I’d already worked that all over before the stupid thing even hit the ground.  I fell asleep sweating and woke up sweating, so I knew today was t...

        There’s this meme I love  where a real boy is eating ice cream next to a picture of people also eating ice cream. The joke is that this is what it is like to listen to podcasts.  You feel like you  are a part of the conversation, like you  are hanging out with your  friends. But really, the people you’re listening to all live in Los Angeles and have NO CLUE who you are.         I saw a matinee of Rocketman last week. Just me and a bunch of senior citizens who kept gasping out loud  and talking to Elton, and all  I wanted to do was yell at them, “THE MOVIE CAN’T HEAR YOU!!!!!!!!” But in my kitchen, listening to the Doughboys hypothesize about some bullshit like the differences between two types of cheese, I am the obnoxious senior citizen gasping out loud and screaming at my phone.  I can’t help my friendless self. Sometimes in podcasts, they (the hosts/ my personal best friends) will even be like, ...

        Every couple of months, I decide that Something Else is wrong with me, and then I take all these weird and drastic steps to Fix Myself. For example, my mom told us at Thanksgiving dinner 2 years ago that my dad has a gene mutation called MTHFKR or some shit like that. (The doctor told him it was the motherfucker gene--no joke--and so that is how we all remember the acronym without knowing exactly which letters made it there.) It has something to do with digesting some kind of protein (I think--I refuse to look it up because then I will immediately have all of the symptoms again), and it can cause all kinds of weird stuff, like anxiety, which runs like a racehorse through my family.         In order to fix this problem, my mom used her #1 superpower of 2-day free amazon prime shipping to send me and my sister these weird vitamins. I took them diligently every morning for months without ever really knowing if they were changing anything. Mo...