Me and my beachwear.
Over the summer, Kendrick's friend at work told him about a beach town not too far from us called "Capitola." He said it had a cute downtown, great restaurants, and a cafe right on the water where you can sit and get a drink while you watch the surfers. We've been meaning to go forever, but because we have spectacular timing we decided to wait until November. To go to a beach town.
Sometimes the Internet can feel like this - but other times it lets you get through.
I had an interesting little thing happen to me last night, and it got me thinking, so I wanted to tell you about it.
The story actually starts way back in 1990, when nine-year-old me developed an obsession with the horror writer Dean Koontz (whose books my parents probably should not have let me read, but I seem to have turned out okay, if slightly more invested in the Saw series than the average bear). I decided to write Dean Koontz a fan letter telling him that I wanted to be just like him when I grew up, and several months later I received a typed (on a typewriter!) letter in response. It was clearly a sort of standardized fan mail response letter to which he had added a line about how I should "stick with my dream of being a writer" or something to that effect - but when I opened that envelope I died. I could hardly have been more excited had the man himself shown up at my house with an invitation to accompany him to a private screening of another 1990 obsession of mine, the movie Leviathan (it's a classic; don't judge).
Both of my children are looking at the camera and not being (too) weird.
Halloween miracle.
I'm fully aware we're nice and oversaturated with Halloween content over here, but there are two things from last night that I really do have to show you.
Over the years my Halloween fails have been epic, and last weekend was no different.
OK, so Saturday night may not have been my finest parenting moment. My friend Erin - whose son and daughter are the same ages as my own, and who are very close with our kids - told me she'd heard about a haunted house that a family had set up in their home a couple of blocks away, and asked if we wanted to come check it out with them. It was starting up after Goldie's bedtime, but I asked Indy if he wanted to go and obviously he was all "SPOOKY STUFF?!?! YEAH!" So once night fell, we paused Ghostbusters (which, as a sidenote, gave me a super-fun opportunity to explain to my son exactly what people are doing when they show their middle finger; thank you Ghostbusters), put on Jedi robes, and headed out.
And then what happened was that I maybe possibly traumatized my child for all eternity.
For many years, I thought my experiences of sexual assault were normal. But now, thanks to Donald Trump, I can finally admit that they're #notokay.
A lot of statements that Donald Trump has made over the past several months have made me furious. But none, I think, more than his dismissal of the statements he made on that video (the one that by now we've all seen and discussed ad infinitum) as "locker room talk." The moment the words left his mouth, I wanted to scream.
I'm going to get really personal in this one in ways that aren't easy for me, so let's start in a place we can all recognize: the college frat. At Harvard (at the time I was there, at least), we didn't really have fraternities and sororities; our campus social life revolved instead around institutions called "final clubs." They resembled the Greek system in nearly every way, save for the fact that they were only open to men. And the fact that a relatively small group of men held the reins of their university's nightlife had exactly the results you'd expect: they admitted girls to their clubs (or dismissed them) as they saw fit, rejected non-member male students entirely, and essentially behaved however they wanted to, secure in the knowledge that they were protected by decades - even centuries - of tradition (not to mention some extremely deep pockets).
