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The Trouble with Auto-Correct

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My husband nearly got himself killed last night, and it wasn’t because of yesterday’s East Coast 5.9 earthquake. No, he texted me late last night, letting me know he wouldn’t be coming home. Why? “There are no nudes available.” It was two minutes before he realized his auto-correct mistake and hastily re-texted that there were no “buses” available. (It is still unclear how his auto-correct got “nudes” from “buses,” but we won’t go there right now.) That was an exceedingly l-o-n-g two minutes, and it is quite amazing how much of the divorcing to-do list one can suddenly generate and [...] Read more »

On Beethoven and Women’s Running Pants

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Today I finally realized what Beethoven and the designer of my black women’s running pants have in common: they both dislike women. (Or at least certain kinds of women.) Perhaps I should explain. I am in a choral group that’s preparing his Missa Solemnis right now, and Beethoven does nasty things to the sopranos. Yes, really. He writes voice parts for us that aren’t “natural” to the human soprano voice (maybe natural to hyenas, but last I checked, hyenas don’t read notes off a page very well, so kudos on that one, Beethoven). Darkly-muttered epithets of vindictiveness have been hissed [...] Read more »

On the Rise (but Mostly Fall) of the Art of Seduction

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It is truly a brave new world out there. Oh, I know every generation sincerely tells their kids that they walked to school barefoot in the snow uphill both ways, and that they should be very grateful for all the things they have that the prior generation didn’t. And I know every generation which hears this secretly thinks their parents or caregivers are archaic beyond their powers to express. And then, years down the road, the younger generation not only find themselves increasingly viewing their parents as quite the progressives…they have begun telling the next-younger generation the “uphill in the [...] Read more »

On Facebook and Technology

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Okay. So I will be the first one to admit that my social skills (or lack of them thereof) are woefully inadequate for this phenomenon known as Facebook. Apparently I am not far enough up the evolutionary ladder to have acquired and adapted the qualities and skillset I need in order to function appropriately in this new space frontier anytime in the near future. Let me see. For starters, all of the body, voice, movement, and social cues that we humans have become so subconsciously adept at reading (you know, the ones that communication experts tell us make up more [...] Read more »

How Not to Pick up Women at the Local 7-11

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All right. Far be it from me (usually) to be telling everyone else how they should run their love life. Not only am I so not an expert on this topic, but with the demands of simply being an adult in this world (ie, caring for the people in my life, caring for the pets in my life, being a student, making a living, and the usual appointments/engagements/errands/stuff that make up daily life), I simply have no time or interest in telling other people how to run their lives. I’m too busy trying to manage my own, frankly. But since [...] Read more »

About My Short-Lived Career as a Music Critic

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Just recently someone told me that I’m musically gifted!!!  I was instantly very impressed with both myself and them, and I immediately began to wonder what I should do with this newly-discovered greatness. I had heard tales of this sort of incredibly amazing giftedness emerging later in life and not during the child prodigy stage, but I never expected it to be me. Perhaps my natural humility prior to this time simply didn’t permit me to recognize my clearly-obvious-and-stellar-in-hindsight gifts for what they were and are. (Hmm…come to think of it, I’ll need to re-examine other categories of my life [...] Read more »

On Matchmaking, or My Complete Ineptitude at Trying to Preserve the Human Race

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So. A few of my single female friends got the idea that I should help set them up with appropriate men. Now in theory this sounds like an excellent idea; the women are lovely, intelligent, and accomplished, all of them.  The problem in actual practice: in recent years I have completely sucked as a matchmaker. Allow me to illustrate with a few recent examples. I was to keep my eye out for eligible men for a friend of mine at a cocktail-style event we both attended. Wouldn’t you know it…if I didn’t find a lovely man for her! He had [...] Read more »

A Pugsley Kind of Love

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Getting a dog has taught me more about love than what I ever could have imagined. I realize now that I’d been subconsciously assuming that the most important things I could learn about love would of course be learned through two-footed beasts, not four-footed ones. Well, I was wrong. I have been unexpectedly surprised, and humbled, and sometimes awed outright by what this hairy, smelly, not-fully-house-trained, non-college-educated, unemployed, underachieving, snoring, shedding, and oversleeping animal (20 hours out of every 24) has helped me come to know about the nature of love. Here, in no particular order, are just a few [...] Read more »