Just because I’m not a naturally inclined athlete doesn’t mean I’m not competitive. In fact, it’s probably a testimony to shamefully competitive nature that while I’m the worst at all sports, I do not accept defeat until I am bloody, beaten, and broken. In middle school when the other kids were excelling at [...]

My Grandmother smoked until her second quadruple bypass was followed in rapid succession by a series of small strokes. To be fair, I don’t know if she so much as choose to give up smoking as she forgot that she ever had been a smoker. (Stroke jokes by Stokes!) The woman had smoked most of [...]

It is seven-thirty on a Monday night. I had paid seventeen dollars, bought the over-priced diet coke and popcorn without grousing, and sat myself down in the theatre, jamming the 3-D glasses down hard on my wide-nose and over my other set of actual practical (though still capable of enabling me to view the world [...]

    The first time it happened, I was too young to know what a ‘panic attack’ was – I thought the devil was yelling at me, or I was going crazy, or the world was ending. That’s a lot of existential shit for a six year old to handle. But my first attack wasn’t [...]

As previously chronicled (possibly to death? I don’t know…) I am not a thin woman. I never have been. I’ve always been this knock-kneed, fleshy, big-eyed creature. My sister, an artist, recently sent me a piece she had done featuring a photograph of me as a kid. I’m standing, hand on my hips, ankle-deep in [...]