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This is the archive page for my blog. I am now putting my writing here, and I have a newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

A Walk With Laura In Forest Park

Five Resolutions for (Mostly) Grown-Ups: 2014 Edition

Make breakfast. How good is breakfast? All the good foods are relevant at breakfast: pancakes, waffles, steamed green things, scrambled whatever-you-want, caramelized onions, assorted breads in assorted baskets, coffee, orange juice, all the fruits -- I could go on and on. It's like at the beginning of time someone was like, "Man, mornings really suck. I have an idea! Let's have a designated time where we eat ALL THE GOOD FOODS in the morning, and then we won't think being alive is the worst thing possible." That person was a really smart person. Breakfast makes life seem a lot less dire. And yet, alas. Busy, busy Modern-Day Man is always SKIPPING breakfast! Or throwing a Pop Tart in her backpack and running out the door. Or going to Burger King to order a Diet Coke at 7 a.m. One day, Modern-Day Man will be old and dying, and she will look back at her life and wonder why she didn't eat more breakfast. There are so few complete and total pleasures in life. Breakfast is one of them. It is also really good for you: there are scads of articles on the health benefits of breakfast. So this year I will go to bed a little earlier so I can wake up a little earlier so I can make more breakfast. I'll try not to Instagram it too often.

Dear Sophie Love Sophie

I have kept a diary religiously since I was five. (I say "religiously" at least in part because until I was an atheist, I believed that my diary was basically a telegram service to God.) I often wrote open-ended questions as if someone was going to read my diary and answer them. A sample: Who will ever love me? Will I ever be loved? Would I be loved if I was less fat? What IS love, anyway? I am alone, and fat, and should I therefore basically be dead? Etc.

Ruins

I am having a massive anxiety attack because I look out at the Grecian ruins, and they're beautiful, and they look like sherbert made out of stone, and I can't even begin to comprehend how old they are, or how many people had to suffer to build them, or how many people had to die behind them, and now there is a gift shop on them, and it sells little clay versions of the big stone ruins, and it sells ice cream that is made out of chemicals and not ice OR cream, and what will the gift shops sell in 3000 years, and no one can know because time is a continuum for now, because we are specks, and that's OK, but it feels less OK when you are around ruins.

Top 10 Best Comedy Albums of 2013

This list is depressingly white-male-dominated. There are two entries here that blatantly benefited from affirmative action (guess which two!), because I got to number seven and was like, "Oh my God, there isn't a female comedian on this list."

I don't think that's because there's a shortage of funny women in the world. I think it's because for whatever reason, mainstream stand-up comedy is a woefully masculine world, and old habits die hard. So I have two honest requests for you, world:

SHORT DESCRIPTIONS OF ALL THE MEN I HAVE MET SINCE I HAVE BEEN IN GREECE, ALL OF WHOM I HAVE CONSIDERED MAKING OUT WITH:

Top 20 (ish) Best Songs of 2013

Yesterday's list was long, involved, heady, and very pretentious. This list is also pretty pretentious, but I decided to keep my defenses down to 100 words or less, so lucky you. Scroll to the bottom for a Spotify playlist. (Or you can just follow me on Spotify. I hang out on there like a sixteen-year-old with hair in his eyes at a Hot Topic.) The list, just so you know, is in reverse order. (So the best is at the bottom, just like yogurt.) (Good analogies today, Sophie! You were an English major.)

Chocolate Croissant

This morning I woke up from a really scary nightmare in which a murderer who had the same voice and disposition as the dog Doug from the movie "Up" was trying to stab my friend Molly and me with a knife in a dark suburban neighborhood. When I woke up, I was traumatized and felt certain that actual death was imminent. Alexis said, "Let's go to a coffee shop." I thought, "I might as well. It might be the last coffee shop I ever go to, what with all the soft-spoken murderers just wandering the streets."

Top 10 (ish) Best Albums of 2013

It's list time. I'm obsessed with lists, and I start my "Best Albums" list research in January, in a Moleskine designed for that very purpose, LIKE THE GIGANTIC SNOB THAT I AM. It comes from the days when VH1 was all I really cared about, and I used to sit about three inches from the TV waiting to see if "Push" by Matchbox 20 would have the number one spot again (it always did). So anyway, this list isn't just thrown together. I have been listening, rating, and thinking about it since January 14, when I reviewed my first "album up for consideration" of the year -- Yo La Tengo's "Fade." Which didn't even come close to making the cut, by the way.

Books

A book demands an incredible balance of order and chaos, more than any other art form. To physically make a book requires math and measurement; patience and exactitude. It requires all the most beautifully frustrating parts of sculpture and mechanics: count the pages, set the type, measure the spine, adhere, bind, sew, mold. But to decide what to put inside a book requires uniqueness, brilliance, and a little bit of insanity. You must know what makes a poem beautiful; what makes a story deserving; what makes an essay move like a tree. You must understand the divine, disorganized order of language. A book can also contain paintings, or prints, or drawings, or photographs. It can hold any visual image that can be made flat. When you are deciding what to put inside a book, you are a genius of arrangement: you must have a firm grasp of what should go next to what, and what should come before what, and what should follow. A book engages every human sense: it is meant to be held, interacted with, manipulated. Books necessarily relate to human beings the way lovers do: no one has the same experience with a book as anyone else. To make a good book is to have mastered the art of collecting: to know just how to place every letter into every word into every sentence alongside every image onto every page into every signature into a beautiful, handheld, wholly singular edition, and it is the most amazing thing Man has ever learned how to do. Also, books smell great.

Aegina

Yesterday we went to an island called Aegina. The fact that this island's name is very similar to a certain part of the female anatomy was not at all lost on my family. If anyone spoke English on the ferry on the way to Aegina, I can promise you that they were disgusted and disappointed, because my family is loud, and we think we are VERY funny.

Greece Is The Word

I am in Greece.

I don't really know what I want to write about Greece yet, and that has prevented me, largely, from writing. I keep thinking, "I don't have a crux. I don't have point. There's no purpose to this writing. I will end up just listing."

Work Binge

I got back from Belize two nights ago, very late. I secretly love coming home from vacations: there's almost always one piece of good mail, and for a little while the cats aren't jerks because (they hate to admit it but) they were a little lonely. Sometimes I look forward to coming home from a vacation so much that I fail to enjoy the vacation itself properly. I tried not to let that be the case in Belize, although I found parts of Belize to be a challenge: namely, when you are there, you are supposed to relax.

Doing Things

We spent two nights in Caye Caulker -- a small limestone coral island off the coast of Belize. When I say "small," I mean you can easily walk the length of it -- in fact, that's really the only way to get around. The roads are made of sand-dirt-mud; the houses are all wide open and breezy and choked with swinging hammocks and candy-colored Adorondak chairs and reggae music. Every single building is either a place where you can have sex on your honeymoon, or a place where you can buy dirt-cheap grilled lobster. It's heaven.

Thanksgiving Barrier Reef

I have only ever spent Thanksgiving with my family.

I have these big dreams about how Thanksgiving should look, which are not unlike my big dreams about how the Fourth of July should look, which are not unlike my big dreams about how My Birthday should look, and so on and so forth. That's right: I'm a Holiday Romantisizer. I should probably come clean.

A Little Bit Drunk

Last night my coupled-up roommates had a pair of coupled-up friends over to eat chicken in our kitchen. I was invited, but I am a vegetarian, and also, I am woefully un-coupled-up. Usually, this isn't a big deal, but it stressed me out last night because the boy in the coupled-up friend pair was someone I had briefly dated, and who had rejected me, I am pretty sure because my breasts are too small. He said it was because I was too nice, but that's a stupid reason that no one would ever believe. I think it's because my breasts are too small. That's generally what I assume when I get broken up with. My bra size is 34-Nearly-A. That's literally what it says on the tag: "Nearly A." It's like the bra company wants me to think that if I try hard enough, I might be able to do better. To protect everyone's identity here, we will call this friend couple Diane and Woody.

Casino

Yesterday I met my friend Allie for tea. Because it was under 70 degrees in New Orleans and no one has central heat or any sort of grit, everyone else in the city had the exact same idea, and the coffee shop where we met up was super-crowded. We lurked near the tables of the people with empty cups like vultures hoping for something to die, but to no avail. These were the 22-year-olds-moving-back-in-with-their-parents of coffee-shop-goers: they were going to hang on as long as they could.

Don't Belize The Hype

Six years ago, I met Carrie at Teach for America Institute. At first, I didn't like her because I was smoking a cigarette and she said, "You seem like a really cool person, and those will kill you, so I wish you wouldn't smoke that." I hate it any time someone points out that I am making a mistake. I want to be the kind of person who never, ever makes a mistake, like George Clooney. I'm not unique in this, I don't think. Most people want nothing more than to be right all the time. Especially most seven-year-olds. Which is my age, after you adjust for emotional maturity.