tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-151202702024-03-13T05:43:32.466-05:00UNCOMFORTABLE MOMENTSWe're all feeling pretty uncomfortable right now, I'd say.Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.comBlogger300125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-90957007413097661982020-12-31T11:07:00.015-05:002020-12-31T11:26:03.062-05:00Brutal.Challenging. Unprecedented. Unpredictable. Difficult. Dismal. Brutal. Of the many adjectives I’ve seen applied to this year, probably the oddest is “odd.” I mean, 2020 wasn’t like your quirky, wayward cousin. It was a steady stripping away of lives, livelihoods, faith in democracy, and whatever fantasy of racial equality many of us white people were complacently enjoying. Of course it’s Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-37719880321795943772019-04-19T13:02:00.001-05:002019-04-19T16:07:49.228-05:00Twilight."Wow, look at those nails. Did you do that yourself?" the anesthesiologist asked.
He was lifting the top of my gown and plunking electrodes along the top of my chest as he talked. Yes, I said, I'd done it myself. It looked like nail art, but it was just a polish.
The night before, I’d chosen the multichrome coating of sparkle expressly for this day, anticipating the discomfort and the Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-20975651013907437142019-03-24T11:25:00.000-05:002019-03-26T10:52:48.314-05:00Silence.She had sat there, she said, and thought about her own lifelong habit of explaining herself, and she thought about this power of silence, which put people out of one another's reach....Yet if people were silent about the things that happened to them, was something not being betrayed, even if only the version of themselves that had experienced them? —Rachel Cusk, Outline
More and more I wondered Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-35833550336686908832017-07-30T06:59:00.002-05:002017-07-30T06:59:45.461-05:00Like and Subscribe.
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Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-51419088551483693682017-07-27T07:26:00.003-05:002019-03-24T11:28:21.845-05:00Slowroll.
Sometimes getting older feels like a complimentary crash
course in things you never wanted to understand. What it’s like to become
seemingly blurrier to other people as a woman. How it feels to have losses
accumulate at a higher and higher rate, like contractions before a birth. How
you were wrong all of the times you clucked over other people’s misfortunes while
vaguely assuming no such thing Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-64896532289613832442016-11-12T12:57:00.000-05:002016-11-13T14:12:57.120-05:00Waking Up.
I am not here to add words or feelings about the election of our nation's first orange president. Several other people have expressed all of the words and all of the feelings much more eloquently than I ever could.
I am here to talk about snoring. On Wednesday morning the house was empty but for me and a very persistent, shuffling bass note note rising and falling in the hallway. After picking Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-74493077211028183822016-07-26T20:28:00.000-05:002016-07-28T15:00:40.018-05:00Yes.I love this thought, speaking as the child author of an unpublished how-to series on spying.
I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there. Children--in f you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children--children lie all the time. They have to lie. It's the only way they can do what they want to. They Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-835501934976048252016-07-01T21:52:00.002-05:002016-07-01T21:52:25.512-05:00Independence Day.The passage below, scrabbled on the back of a flyer, was recently culled from my extensive archive. I decided to share it here because to me it's an embarrassingly perfect expression of pure self-pity, especially the kind you feel when you're a single twentysomething in New York in the 1990s.
I can remember whom this is about, but the details, as well as the feelings, are like one of those fadedChristinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-22385270666230798532016-06-21T21:25:00.000-05:002016-06-29T22:49:01.897-05:00Billable.The beginning of this year was a doozy, wasn't it? My posts to this blog seemed like they were going to take flight as if it were the mid-2000s again, as if blogging were still a thing. Then the funding for my job went into slow-motion implosion and, well, priorities shifted.
But it's not just that. This blog sometimes feels like that friend you haven't written to in awhile. You really want to Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-36513327135629908172016-02-17T19:38:00.002-05:002016-02-17T22:55:03.803-05:00Stop Telling Women to Smile.On the way back to the office from an outing today, I spent a good few minutes thinking about being told to smile by strangers on the street. I'd just passed a potential "smile" zone that proved to be quiet, but it made me think how amazing it is that women who go around minding their own business all day long still have to deal with so much unsolicited running commentary.
"Smile for me!"
"SmileChristinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-84086732488629895072016-02-16T19:24:00.000-05:002016-02-24T21:00:45.168-05:00Custard.Early on in our seven-year history, I learned that Sir UM has a soft spot for the egg custard tart. You usually see this little guy at dim sum meals, but during an early visit to San Francisco, he took me to a bakery in Chinatown JUST to get the tart.
My experience of Asian food growing up white in the Maryland suburbs was: "Chinese takeout." In quotes. That's it. Cashew chicken, moo shu Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-18496792567006710942016-02-05T11:02:00.001-05:002016-02-05T11:02:50.846-05:00OH: A Bizarre Attachment to Gender Identity via LEGO.
Thursday evening, crowded Metro elevator in the suburbs. A little girl, about five years old with two dark blond ponytails, stands with her dad. She is clutching a LEGO creation.
Stranger Lady, who is a loud talker: "WOOOowww do you have more of those at home?" (referring to the LEGO).
I assume the girl answered somehow, but the elevator was crowded, so I couldn't see the exchange.
Stranger Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-87878420865092510562016-01-19T22:38:00.001-05:002016-01-20T14:45:48.583-05:00Without Warning."Huge bombshell," my mom texted last week.
"[He] is leaving [her.] They went back to [state redacted], settled on their new house, and then"
Here the text ended, like a cliffhanger scene in a soap opera. The portentous iMessage ellipsis told me to wait five minutes. And then:
"He went to the lawyer, put the house in her name, went home and told her he would be leaving because he needs to be Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-23903835754103261612016-01-19T11:57:00.002-05:002016-01-20T14:45:14.342-05:00Frozen.To me it's a crying shame, and I know Adele would agree, that when you type the words "frozen video" into Google, that there is no trace, not a shred of evidence, that Madonna ever sang a song with that title, not to mention filmed a clip where she falls onto the desert earth and transforms into a bunch of birds.
That's because all the results are about Disney's rip-off of Snow Queen.
Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-77758090079661200282016-01-11T23:46:00.000-05:002016-01-12T20:31:12.662-05:00Put On Your Red Shoes and Dance the Blues."You are to keep your gliding motion, no dancer will be able to move as gracefully as you, but at every step it will feel as if you were treading on a sharp-edged knife, so sharp that your feet will seem to be bleeding." —Hans Christian Andersen, "The Little Mermaid"
January. The Christmas tree is out on the sidewalk. The boxes are put away. The light through the windows, when you finally wake Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-46330969234524752622016-01-07T23:09:00.000-05:002016-01-13T20:14:49.514-05:00Sitting Ducks.Lately the word "weird" gets uttered a lot at my workplace.
The organization I work for is going through a seismic shift. Longtime employees have been bought out. Good people are being let go, or getting fed up and leaving of their own accord. For the rest of us, it's lots of shrugging, sad smiles, and saying "things are weird."
I am not exactly like most other employees, though. I Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-13722739110416150032016-01-06T22:38:00.001-05:002016-01-12T20:44:32.692-05:00The Second Bakery Attack.
"Yo! So, I’m shutting down [my company's] hosting stuff. Can you find a new home for [oldsite.com] by year end?" my brother wrote in November.
Here's just how dated my old portfolio site is: The name at the top is "open session." Does this ring a bell, dear reader? Did you, by chance, use UNIX or FTP in the nineteen nineties?
Keeping that site alive was a form of digital hoarding. I Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-82453773339500086122016-01-05T21:39:00.000-05:002016-01-12T08:44:01.155-05:00Just Pretend This Is a YouTube Video.Hey guuyys,
So, I'm really excited for the new year annnndd so one of my resolutions for 2016 is to start posting more on this blog! Sooo as always, if you have any requests for posts you'd like to see, like things that you're uncomfortable about and want to share, or more audio excerpts like this one, or really like anything you want to see, just hit me up in the comments below.
Annnndd if youChristinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-79298231947851430142016-01-04T21:29:00.000-05:002016-01-05T22:32:39.460-05:00I'd Prefer to Go Back to My Regular Work-Anxiety Nightmares, Thanks.
I was standing in a glassed-in, white-carpeted office, having visited on business: an interview, maybe, or a project assignment.
Two men nearby were chatting as I was about to leave.
"Yeah, I've had this assignment for weeks and am still waiting for details so I can do the research."
"Ugh, I hate it when that happens. I'm in the exact same boat."
They were exchanging weary, Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-69578916287968841522015-12-30T12:30:00.002-05:002016-01-01T17:30:45.167-05:00A Decade of Discomfort.In the end I was too callow to leave up the mortifying karaoke video that I posted here briefly, but 2015 is calling for just one more tumbleweed of a post on this lonely corral. Believe it or not, Uncomfortable Moments turned 10 this year. Who knew? It doesn't look a day over 45, in Internet years.
Saying I tried to update the template to my blog yesterday—which is true—is like saying I tried Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-28229715752162257012015-12-21T21:04:00.000-05:002015-12-21T21:53:20.081-05:00A Metro Carol.The day after that last post about kindness and commuting, this happened:
"Spare any change? A nickel or a dime? Spare change, spare change? A nickel or a dime?"
The man made his way through the silent metro car, looking straight ahead. I'd seen him pass through the Red Line a few times before over the past year, always with the same refrain. This morning he'd reached the end of the Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-75602556038429810152015-12-16T21:16:00.000-05:002015-12-17T22:34:31.808-05:00Transit.
"I check Uncmo frequently but no updates so I must assume you're living a life well at ease!" a friend wrote recently.
That seemed, to me, like a bit of a rush to judgment.
I took the picture above coming home on the Metro one summer evening. My biggest reservation about moving to the suburbs was giving up the trifecta: job, gym, and grocery store within 15 minutes of walking or (San Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-57155323438818193242015-07-07T18:33:00.003-05:002015-07-07T18:59:41.048-05:00How Many Licks?The mother ushering three small kids into the ice cream parlor had an American accent, yet asked all three of us clearly standing in line, "Is this the queue? Is that the end of the queue there?"
Having affirmed the obvious, she broadcast her directions to the girls. "Okay, let's stand in the queue behind these two lovely ladies!" We all stood for a bit, and then the two lovely ladies Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-74723917246997403832015-04-20T22:21:00.002-05:002015-12-29T20:55:53.934-05:00What Is a Daffodil?A daffodil is a yellow, delicate flower.
That is what I would have told you before I moved to Silver Spring.
(Silver Spring is suburban hell. That is what I would have told you before I moved to Silver Spring.)
We saw this house on a rainy December day. It was warm and lit, the family evacuated temporarily, and there were just-baked cupcakes on the stove. It was a Home.
In the dark of Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120270.post-89259407387634315632015-02-20T22:10:00.002-05:002015-02-21T05:48:29.140-05:00What Do You Want, I'll Give You What We Have.
You'd think from the lack of posting here that my life has been one unbroken boulevard of comfortable moments.
But oh no. What it's been is one unbroken boulevard of overwhelm alternating with laziness, a hearty helping of awkwardness sprinkled liberally throughout.
The exchange I want to tell you about took place recently in Glendive, Montana, about 220 miles outside Billings. Christinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15045035862531946198noreply@blogger.com0