few luxuries are better than mornings spent in the company of good coffee and good friends.

grown ups remember new year's 2k12

• megan: sure, i mean, i tried [coke], like, five years ago, but he's 28 now
• me: yeah
• megan: we're too old for that shit now
• me: ...
• megan: what?
• me: but not too old to drink so much i have to hold your hair back while you puke into the toilet?
• megan: shut up, slut

gussied up to ring in 2012

This is the road that leads away from my dad’s house. His new house, that warms a gravel road and lights an otherwise lonely patch of woods in Pennsylvania farm country. 

At some point, it stopped being “going home” and has become “going to Pittsburgh,” and new houses, older sisters, foreign roads and familiar drives are all a part of that. This year, it also brought a punchy sort of joy, mostly from hearing of friends’ kids, wives, engagements, successes and bigwig jobs on alternate coasts.  

Explaining my reality in the city to old friends — studio apartment, middling job, intermittent affections — has perhaps become a complicated answer. Something about the description feels empty, or belies a condition of being unsettled. I can’t even commit to getting a cat for fear of the attached identity (cat lady, died alone in her apt, found 3 weeks later, etc.).

What’s that C&H quote? I hate to think that all my current experiences will someday become stories with no point. Instead, I worry that all my current experiences won’t produce enough stories, pointed or pointless. 

Misery’s not being the lone childless lady at the 30-year reunion, it’s being the one without a catalog of exploits instead.

headed to drink some beers with the pittsburgh hometowners i miss much more than i get to see.

happy holiday homecoming mirror play.

My really good friend, Morgan, illustrated Bill Keller’s NYT Mag column.