It’s a rare occasion when I get one-on-one time with Liam, but recently one evening he asked to play Uno and, because this coincided with another rare occasion, which was that all three kids were having school lunch the next day so I needn’t pack any, dinner was easy and already ready, and the other two children were happily engaged together elsewhere in the house, I actually could stop what I was doing and sit down to engage with him. We played two rounds of rip-roaring two-player Uno, and I commented on how much I was enjoying it. Brian overheard this and said, “Right?! Life with one!”, meaning “How different and great (at times) would it be to only have a singleton as offspring!”

A few days later:

Arlo: “Does anybody want to play catch?”
Alison: “Sure, I’d like to play catch with you!”
Arlo: “No, I asked if anybody wants to play CATS.”
Alison: “Oh.”
Summerly: “I’ll play cats!”
Alison: (to myself) ‘Thank god I have all these kids because I have absolutely no desire to play cats ever again until maybe I’m a grandmother but probably not even then.”

And a couple of nights after that:

Alison (to Brian): “It’s been the kind of day that, if a person could die from being tested by one’s kids, you’d be writing my obituary.”
Brian: “How many years ago?”

As of this writing, the “Falcon’s Flight” rollercoaster in Saudi Arabia is in the design stage, but when completed, it will edge out Japan’s “Steel Dragon 2000” to take the title of “longest rollercoaster in the world” with a ride of approximately three minutes’ duration. According to a press release made by the Six Flags Qiddiya’s CEO, Falcon’s Flight “won’t be for the fainthearted”. Take a knee, Falcon’s Flight. The longest rollercoaster in the world will always be Parenthood, and the ride lasts for a minimum of eighteen years.

I was listening to a podcast in the car one day in which a woman was explaining her complicated situation to a therapist. During the discussion, she referenced a workshop she’d attended at which the presenter had asked everyone to write down what they would identify as the most significant problems in their lives. The presenter asked them to consider these problems for a minute while looking at the words on paper. Then the woman recalling this experience paraphrased the presenter’s next point, and I rewound the podcast so many times I lost count, listening to this explanation over and over again until I’d committed it to memory. These are the exact words she used: “The problems you have today are the problems you’re not willing to give up for the ones that you would have if you gave them up.”

For some reason, I found this tremendously profound, probably partly because it’s also so obvious. But hearing it pronounced this way, in that one succinctly lucid sentence, struck a chord. Not only did this idea train a spotlight on the veracity of the concept as it applies to many people, but it also shed perspective on the place of privilege that one inhabits if this statement rings true. If the most pronounced problems in our lives are ones we choose to keep lest we face other, more difficult or unpleasant problems, we are among the most fortunate. Think of those whose greatest challenges can’t just be exchanged for another set of challenges; think of those who would leap at the chance to change their station because their problems are so onerous that no alternative could be less desirable. I’m talking about people who would consider their race to be the issue that presents the most difficulty. I’m talking about people who would cite their gender at birth as such. Homeless people. People with a disability or a disease. People who are bereft and grieving a loved one. People without access to enough food. People who live unhappily with an addiction or mental health affliction. This list, I’m sure, could continue.

I know, the presenter at that workshop was aware of the demographic of his or her audience and was speaking directly to them. For them, and for people like me, I love the frame of reference those words provide: many, if not all, of our problems are ones we have by choice. We keep those problems around voluntarily because we’re averse to the alternatives. This perspective makes these problems feel less like problems and more like opportunities; it makes them feel less oppressive and more intentional. It divests them of some of their negative power, which makes more space for gratitude. I want to keep that sentence fresh in my mind, at the forefront of my consciousness, as I go through this incredibly lucky life, so I remember to keep flipping the script on the plights that blight my time on this earth. And I want to introduce the idea to my children while they’re still really young to give them a tool to carry around in their social-emotional pocket, in hopes that they can pull it out to pick the locks on the doors life tends to put up. I want them to learn to turn those doors into mirrors that then become windows. For once, I’ll be the one asking them questions that begin with those two little words kids love to use with their parents. When they identify a complaint that shows their good fortune or privilege, when they express displeasure about a problem they have that could be considered a gift in disguise, once in a while I want to respond with, “What if you didn’t?”

Anyone else out there need to recover from the weekend?

Something that has bothered me for a very long time is that people are still commonly using the term “stay-at-home mom.” Most people these days even recognize its initialism form (SAHM), which entered our parlance via internet shorthand. First of all, the term doesn’t account for situations where the father is the one holding down the fort while the mother contributes as part of the workforce to bankroll the household. Society “solved” that by adopting “stay-at-home dad” or the less specific “stay-at-home parent”, but these don’t measure up either. Sure, during Covid those parents who didn’t have income-producing jobs probably did spend a lot of their time at home, but even then the term seems so insufficient to express the most essential aspects of what the parent who doesn’t head into work every day (in person or via Zoom during that time) does all day. During non-pandemic times, these parents are rarely just “at home”, or even if they are, that fact does so little to illustrate the nature of their occupation. It beggars belief that, of all of the ways we could describe these parents (or even those who are NOT parents but aren’t traditionally employed for other reasons), the phrase “at home” is the one chosen to identify them. Some posit the option “full-time parent”, but I find this insulting to parents who work because it’s not like they’re only parents when they’re not working. Working parents aren’t “part-time parents”; in fact, one of the major reasons they work is to provide for their family’s livelihood. And don’t even get me started on the obsolete notion of the term “housewife”.

What are they doing if they’re “at home”? Cleaning, shopping, driving kids to and from school and appointments and activities, planning those appointments and activities, reading and sending school-related emails, communicating with family members and friends about things like holidays and birthdays, making sure there are enough clothes to fit each growing child as the seasons change, meal planning and cooking or arranging for food to be available in sufficient quantities and variety to suit dietary preferences or requirements balanced with nutritional needs, scheduling service appointments for vehicle- and home-related repairs or maintenance, volunteering for school parties and field trips, and researching things that would only serve to benefit the family, like the best deals on pet food or what new release chapter books are available in the library. They are picking up prescriptions and making sure all of the bathrooms have enough toilet paper, rotating pantry stock after unloading the groceries, washing and folding laundry, changing the sheets, sewing buttons back on jackets, wiping fingerprints and footprints off the walls, helping with homework just enough but not too much, organizing family photographs so that they aren’t accidentally deleted, doing dishes and vacuuming cat hair from underneath the sofa, mailing the thank-you letters and looking up answers to questions the kids have asked. The list is probably actually endless.

What are those parents NOT doing? Sitting around idly at home. My friend Carmen, who was teaching French and math part-time at a girls’ school, was leaving work one day when a colleague noticed her packing up her stuff. He said, “So, you’re heading home now, huh?” as if she were just cutting out early to go put her feet up (as if that were such a terrible thing for someone getting paid to work part-time to do). I’m sure she wasn’t as scathing in her reply as I’d have been tempted to be, but she did say something like, “Well, now that I’ve finished teaching for today, I’m going to pick up my youngest at preschool, then I’ll make him lunch and entertain him while I prepare dinner before I have to pick up my other three kids at their school so I can get them home and finished with homework and fed in time for my oldest’s virtual ballet class.”

What are other “stay-at-home” adults doing? Caring for an ailing family member, perhaps. Volunteering at any number of organizations. Doing the heavy lifting during a project like a home renovation or landscape overhaul. Walking the dog. Taking care of things that the working parent then does not have to handle, allowing him or her to focus more fully on professionalism, which then favors his or her ability to do better work. And maybe, just maybe, they are taking some time for themselves to do something that helps them function at such a high level for the rest of the day: reading a book, creating art, going for a run, talking to a friend. They might even (perish the thought!) take a nap to prepare for the arduous afternoon and evening of devoting attention, time and energy to others after a morning of the same. Humans (in general) aren’t programmed to be happy if they are constantly giving to others without also giving to themselves. Those moments of time that might seem selfish are actually quite the opposite; for me, at least, when I’ve spent half an hour reading a book for pleasure or taken the morning to write or turned on a podcast while I whittle away at a craft project for a little while in between all of the tasks and line items on my “to-do” list, I do better for my family. I’m more patient and less distracted. I’m more inclined to genuinely enjoy spending time with them rather than feel exhausted by their incessantness (and they definitely pick up on this). The metaphors abound: who wants an overtired pilot flying their plane? Who would choose to board a ship with a nervous wreck for a captain? How happy can a workplace be when run by a resentful boss? No one can run a marathon on an empty stomach, and even if they could, neither would the results yield “personal best”, nor would it be healthy.

I’m going to suggest that we espouse a new term to replace the old ones: Family Administration, Management, and Life Improvement Executive, or, in short, FAMLIE. We could use the acronym in writing, but I think when we’re asked what we “do”, we should answer in full to give verbal recognition to the multiplicity and breadth of our occupation. We have certainly earned those twenty syllables.

When our tenant sent a text inquiring about a place to care for her small pets while she was out of town for a couple of weeks, I didn’t have any suggestions but thought maybe the kids would enjoy the experience of petsitting, particularly because we would only have to cross the yard and scale a flight of stairs to check in on them once a day. On our first trip to the apartment to care for the three rats, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, the kids excitedly told our neighbor about them as we left the apartment. The neighbor mentioned that his only experience with rats was feeding them to a snake he used to own, and I replied, “Well, you know what they say: one man’s pet is another man’s pet food.” He laughed at that and said, “You know what’s really cool? Right before the pandemic, we got a lemon tree and found an anole living on it. This past year I’ve spent way too much time watching him and feeding him mealworms and things. I’ve actually gotten pretty invested in keeping him alive and observing his behavior. I swear he’s what got me through Covid.”

Those words just rang so true. Throughout the many months of pandemic life, we all had our own coping mechanisms, our own conduits through which we channeled so much energy and attention as a way to occupy our minds and bodies while we adjusted to and experienced such a different way of life, one that was constantly being oppressed by worry and distress and uncertainty and grief and sometimes desperation. It happened in phases as time passed and the pandemic dynamics progressed and shifted, but we all had our version of the lizard in a lemon tree.

All of these lemon tree lizards looked different, of course. Early on, lots of people adopted puppies. There were many job, even career, changes. I know several people who became newly interested in gardening, and several others who took up an exercise routine. Hobbyists were born by the million, I’d bet. My friend Morgan funneled her focus into the many house projects she’d had on hold. My mom filled her home with cockatiels and parakeets who fly around the house and syndicate the space with cheerful chirping. My friend Ellen invested in a beautiful mountain property and went about beautifying and readying it as a rental to welcome guests. My friend Becca experimented with different media in her impressive artworks. My pet-averse brother somehow ended up with a snake named Chandler living in his apartment. My friend Nate doubled down on his lacrosse stick-stringing skills and upped the ante with a hot glue and Rit dye resist technique to produce some serious masterpieces of sportsware. My grandmother added pigs and chickens to her farm and spent hours in the kitchen on creative projects like making gallons of kiwi purée from her bumper crop last fall. I made wild yeast from golden raisins, flour, and water, which I fed twice daily and used to make sourdough bread until the project had run its course after about ten months. I know a married couple in their late thirties who’d chosen to remain childless, but a few months into quarantine they decided to let nature make the decision. Their baby is due in November.

Would these things have happened anyway, in due course of time? Maybe. There’s no way to really know. But when my neighbor told us about his investment in the livelihood of the anole that had involuntarily taken up residence inside his home at the beginning of Covid, I knew how he felt. I imagined my neighbor, who’s a pretty intense dude as it is, peering into the lemon tree a few times every day, making sure the little guy was thriving, researching what to feed him and ordering insects online, worrying that he wasn’t getting enough water, wondering at the life he had led before, wondering at his welfare in his current state of life, wondering what the world has in store for his future. We’re all my neighbor, cultivating one devotion or another, practicing the survival strategies that propel us through each avenue dimly-lit by sconces of hope, one mealworm or cross-stitch or brushstroke or birdsong or tablespoon at a time, gathering grace from the process like an armful of fortune.

Disclaimer: I promise this will be the last discussion of “Plants vs. Zombies” (for a while, at least)!

Arlo’s deep dive into his “friend who doesn’t know he’s his friend”‘s YouTube channel led us to the purchase of a PvZ game for Playstation 4 (we already owned the console; don’t worry) called “Garden Warfare.” It turned out to be a wild success, and after the kids went to bed during this craze, there were nights that Brian spent some time playing the game, ostensibly to level up the characters for the kids, but also because he really enjoyed it. I have to say, even I grew rather fond of the righteously cute yet fierce flowers and the buffoonish, cartoonish zombies. Even the sound effects, which usually for me are a huge video-game turnoff, didn’t cause stress or annoyance. Plus it was springtime, during those months when the pandemic was finally hinting at its final phases, so it felt appropriate for energy and thought and time to be invested in cultivating plants, including those on screen whose purpose was the salvation of humanity.

One night while I was doing something surely nonessential in the kitchen, Brian was playing “Garden Warfare” with the audio off, and I was paying approximately zero attention to anything going on outside of my headspace and the countertop I was probably cleaning. At one point, he started talking, and when I tuned in I heard him say, “She’s really great! She can heal herself AND she can heal others! She’s kind of powerful. And she’s pretty! She’s sunny, and that’s awesome! I really like her!”

Sunflower, I want to be just like you someday.

Our lives have truly been the landscape of a zombie invasion. It turns out that the zombie craze is no passing fancy; sure, in the scheme of things it’s merely a phase, but it’s proving to be one with some real staying power. Things got more serious when Arlo discovered a YouTube channel featured by the “Plants vs. Zombies” iPad game in which he’d been engrossed for weeks. The channel belongs to a boy named Ryan Phillips, a.k.a. Tewtiy (he’s actually 22, I think, but Arlo calls him a boy, so that’s how he’s known around here). His platform is livestream gaming, where followers can watch him engage in gameplay while sending in messages, and these recordings are uploaded to his channel for asynchronous viewership. The kid is actually rather adorable, with his signature red shirt, blue bow tie, and gravity-defying blonde bangs culminating in a kind of a cartoon version of himself as his online persona, and his videos are pretty great. He only offers family-friendly content, and his gregarious personality paired with a healthy approach both to the material and to the process of playing video games themselves provides entertaining substance and refreshing perspective. I vetted his videos and gave Arlo the green light to enjoy them.

And enjoy them he did. It was his version of watching a spectator sport, and he talked to Ryan while he watched him on screen, encouraging him, congratulating him on successes, sharing disappointment at setbacks, and celebrating euphorically when hard-won victories against the waves of zombies were achieved. The videos were truly a source of delight, and Arlo fell head over heels in brotherly love with him. Naturally, he wanted to communicate with his newfound matinée idol, and he asked countless times if “the boy” could come over for a play date. He wrote him a card saying that he wanted to start a club with him, complete with illustrated plants and zombies, and begged me to send it, so told him I’d look the kid up and see if I could get in contact.

Guys, I did my best. I trawled the internet (not to be confused with the verb phrase “troll the internet”) and found his Instagram account. I wrote him a private message, explaining the situation and asking if he would mind sharing an address where I could send this very important piece of fan mail. I told him that Arlo adores him and thinks he’s a superstar, and I shared the idea that Arlo had for us for Halloween: he would dress up like the Snow Pea plant from the game, and I would be a Conehead Zombie (I’d need a pylon to wear on my head for this). We would buy some jumbo marshmallows, paint them blue, and he would throw them at me. “That would be efic!” said Arlo, when we landed on this plan (he thinks the word “epic” is pronounced “efic”, and no one is correcting him).

A week passed with no response. Arlo was adamant that we try again, so this time I found his email address and wrote a similar message conveying my son’s worshipful opinion of him and thanking him for keeping his channel family-friendly and ultimately fun. Crickets. I searched again, using clues from his videos (his father’s name is Stephen, for instance), trying to unearth a mailing address or any other outreach method, but failed to turn up any leads. Still, Arlo persisted in his desire to make contact, so we thought about creating Arlo’s own YouTube channel and trying to link Ryan’s channel somehow–anything to get his attention. Brian said, “We could structure it as a spin-off paying homage to “the boy’s” channel, and in the description we could say you’re his #1 fan.” Arlo said, “No, I don’t want to say that, because I wouldn’t want all of his other fans to feel bad.”

One thing’s for certain: Ryan is really missing out. I know a great friend when I know one and, as evinced by his response to his dad about fandom, I can’t think of a person more well suited to the act of friendship than Arlo. We no longer refer to Ryan as “the boy” because Arlo started calling him “my friend who doesn’t know he’s my friend”. If we’re to believe Emerson, who said in his “Friendship” essay that “the only way to have a friend is to be one,” then Arlo sure got that right.

When we found out we were having our first baby, I harbored hope that he would embody all of his parents’ best qualities: my knack for math and languages, interest in food and travel, and love of books and plants combined with his father’s rugged good looks, artistic and musical talents, and athletic prowess. Luckily, our firstborn did inherit some of those characteristics, along with a few of our less enviable attributes, as did his two siblings who followed. I never imagined until I encountered this conundrum what a challenge and a gift it would present: here we are raising children who exemplify some of our great strengths as well as a few of our more frustrating behaviors, all meted out among three individuals who are their own people as well.

There is no mirror quite like the one this opportunity provides, and while it is sometimes exasperating, it’s also incredibly beneficial in helping to fortify our ability to identify with how others perceive us. In a way, it objectifies the qualities of our own personalities so that we can understand how they might impact others. It’s like stepping outside of ourselves and witnessing our habits, tendencies, and behaviors with a fresh set of eyes, and this in turn gives us the perspective necessary to self-identify and regulate those aspects of ourselves that we possess both the capacity and the power to control, whether by moderation or modulation.

For example, when I see my daughter yell, run into her room, slam the door, and dig in her ever-loving heels with stubbornness, I see myself and summon empathy. When she accumulates seventeen half-finished art or craft projects that just SIT THERE until she gets around to finishing them, I conjure understanding. When my son spends way too much time deciding which book to read or which treat to choose, I see my own difficulty with decision-making and try to flood my system with patience. When my other son gets a gift and immediately asks for every single other one of its kind in every color and size, I recognize my collector’s impulse and channel grace. Knowing how it feels to be on the receiving end of unwelcome behavior in these instances helps me temper my own actions and reactions in a way that I can’t imagine sourcing elsewhere in such an effective way.

What’s also helpful is witnessing the effect this has on my husband. When we are waiting on a child who is taking his own sweet time but doing whatever he’s doing exceptionally thoroughly and with great results, I’m sure Brian reminds himself of himself to inspire composure. When a child is spending an eternity in the bathroom or has to go RIGHT as a piping-hot homemade meal is presented on the table, I just know why Brian checks his frustration. When a child forms the habit of chewing ice loudly and for extended periods of time in a setting that is otherwise quiet, I see my spouse noticing how incredibly annoying it is. When a child is singing a well-known tune (on key, I should add) but replaces the original words with the names of people or pets in his vicinity, the effect being inane and obnoxiously repetitive bordering on nonsense, it must ring familiar.

There are dozens of these little mirrors that turn up unexpectedly in our everyday experiences in the company of each other, and I think of them like little shields that give us a degree of separation from sometimes unsavory situations. Like Perseus only able to see Medusa as a reflected image in the bronze shield given to him by Athena, so we can see our own moments of monstrousness more clearly by virtue of the generational lens, thereby denaturing those moments’ immobilizing force. Who knew that we’d be inheriting an amplified sense of self-knowledge and therefore self-awareness, such a monumental gift, and from our children, no less?

For months and months, Summerly has requested that I sing along with the recording of “How Far I’ll Go” from “Moana” at bedtime, so I pull up the browser window with the clip from YouTube that I keep open for this purpose. Sometimes it takes me a minute to find it because, well, I have a lot of browser windows open in my iPhone’s Safari internet app. Recently she suggested that we estimate how many windows I have open, and we quickly scrolled through to give us a shot at making an educated guess. I was kind of horrified that we landed on 130 as our estimation, so here goes (feel free to scroll through this ridiculously long catalogue:

1.) Slow Cooker Honey Lime Ginger Pork (Recipe Critic)
2.) Caesar Chicken Recipe (The Cookie Rookie)
3.) Replacement kitchen window crank (Reflect Window & Door)
4.) Slow Cooker Tomatillo Chicken Filling (365 Days of Crockpot)
5.) East Coast Babies: California Gurls Parody (YouTube…I highly recommend checking this one out, by the way)
6.) Sour Cream Noodle Bake (CentsLess Meals)
7.) Kindness Ninjas (Vimeo)
8.) “The Storm” by McNight Malmar (full text)
9.) Belvedere Charlottesville (Google Groups)
10.) “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor (full text)
11.) Gulotta Family (Porchrait photos by Robert Radifera Photography)
12.) Step-by-Step instructions for making the paper airplane that broke world records (Colossal)
13.) Coronavirus Dashboard (it was at 90,779,876 confirmed cases worldwide at the time of this writing)
14.) Monster in law funny clip 1 (sic) (YouTube)
15.) Pearl Jam – Dance of the Clairvoyants (Mach III) (YouTube)
16.) Joanna Gaines shares her family’s favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe (Today)
17.) Lilliputian hallucinations (Google search)
18.) Scrimshaw (Google search)
19.) Susannah + David’s Elopement album (Hunter and Sarah Photography)
20.) Auli’i Cravalho – How Far I’ll Go (YouTube) THERE IT IS!!!
21.) Mooncake (Wikipedia)
22.) Melty Chocolate-Truffle Cookie (epicurious)
23.) Men’s outdoor cold-proof motorcycle leather jacket (Wayrates)
24.) Quick & Easy Chicken Flautas (Together as a Family)
25.) Gregory Gourdet (Wikipedia)
26.) New! Wintergreen Family Ski Retreat w/ Fireplace! (Evolve Vacation Rental)
27.) The Undoing (Google search)
28.) The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries by Topher Payne (another one I recommend!)
29.) Honey Lime Chicken Enchiladas (The Girl Who Ate Everything)
30.) Flourless Black Bean Brownies (ambitious kitchen) (SO GOOD!!)
31.) Do you know when you’re using harmful ableist language? (MindPath Care Centers)
32.) Michael Franti & Spearhead – Hole in the Bucket (YouTube)
33.) Taco Pizza Rolls (Old El Paso)
34.) Double Chocolate Zucchini Bread (Sally’s Baking Addiction)
35.) Authentic English Crumpets Recipe (The Daring Gourmet)
36.) Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Google search)
37.) Easy Homemade Biscuits (Sugar Spun Run)
38.) Basil Pesto Tomato Mozzarella Chicken Bake (Julia’s Album)
39.) Meringue Cookies (Sugar Spun Run)
40.) Meatball Casserole Parmesan (Joy Filled Eats)
41.) The Only Ice Cream Recipe You’ll Ever Need (NYT Cooking)
42.) Vertical List of Enneagram Type Combinations (Lynn Roulo)
43.) Queen Bee mug (Mercari)
44.) Take it on the chin (The Idioms)
45.) Analogy of the Sun (Wikipedia)
46.) Best Gluten Free Shortbread Cookies! (noshtastic)
47.) Peach Muffins Recipe (Allrecipes)
48.) Easy Peach Dumplings (Belly Full)
49.) One Pot Andouille Sausage Skillet Pasta (Damn Delicious)
50.) Tutorial: How to Teach Your Bunny High Five (YouTube)
51.) SignUpGenius (Second Grade, Ms. Scott’s Classroom)
52.) Pumpkin Baked Oatmeal Cups (Sally’s Baking Addiction)
53.) Cosmo Topper (Google search) (Hi, Dad!)
54.) Cameron Monaghan (Google search)
55.) Change-Your-Life Chicken (The Lazy Genius Collective)
56.) Moist and Chewy Banana Oatmeal Cookies (Life, Love and Sugar)
57.) Part of Your World (YouTube)
58.) Emily Arrow – Curious Garden Song (with hand motions & lyrics!) (YouTube)
59.) Vegan Mango Cake Recipe (Eggless Cooking)
60.) 1 Bowl Baked Oatmeal (Sally’s Baking Addiction)
61.) Yum Yum Breakfast Burrito – Parry Gripp (YouTube)
62.) Kuretake (Google search)
63.) Monster Moves song (Google search)
64.) The BEST Fried Rice! (Gimme Some Oven)
65.) Donate to Arlo Gulotta for President 2052 (gofundme)
66.) Roasted Tomato, Mozzarella, and Spinach Quiche Recipe (The Kittchen)
67.) Euphemisms for bad behavior (Google search)
68.) Alicia Keys, Brandi Carlile – A Beautiful Noise (YouTube)
69.) Treasure inside pyramids (Google search)
70.) Dot painting (Google search)
71.) Carrot and Cranberry Salad with Fresh Ginger Dressing (Bon Appétit)
72.) Mary Berry’s chicken with pesto, taleggio, and roasted tomatoes recipe (Love Food)
73.) Slow Cooker Sage and Sausage Stuffing Recipe (Serious Eats)
74.) The Poopsmith Song (YouTube)
75.) Stevie Wonder I Just Called to Say I Love You (YouTube)
76.) Sam Cooke – Cupid (YouTube)
77.) Easy Marzipan Recipe (4 Ingredients) (Sugar Geek Show)
78.) 1201 N Williams St Apt 5 A, Denver, CO 80218 (Realtor.com)
79.) Chickens eating rotten eggs (Google search)
80.) Run DMC – Christmas in Hollis (YouTube)
81.) Turtles all the way down (Google search)
82.) Gertrude’s Secrets (Google search)
83.) The Yellow Wallpaper (Google search)
84.) Top-Load Washers (Lowe’s)
85.) Best Leftovers Ever Winners Now (The Cinemaholic)
86.) Youniverse (Google search)
87.) 102 Dalmations – Trailer (YouTube)
88.) Old can opener (Google images)
89.) Chrysler Pacifica models (Google search)
90.) Photographer Happens Across A Bug That Looks Like A Piece Of Popcorn With Tiny Legs (Bored Panda)
91.) 3D Paper Snowflake Tutorial (YouTube)
92.) 15 Genuinely Fun Activities For Kids That Parents Made Up During Lockdown (Fatherly)
93.) Humbled by the Lowly Stone (Sam Koenen)
94.) Dining Menus (St. Anne’s Belfield)
95.) No Bake Cookies (Cooking Classy)
96.) Almost There – Princess and the Frog (YouTube)
97.) Einstein on Fairy Tales and Education (Brain Pickings)
98.) Yeast Alive! Watch Yeast Live and Breathe (Scientific American)
99.) Salmon Skin Makes You Smarter, Stronger, and Better Looking. Did We Mention That it Tastes Like Bacon? (Sun Basket)
100.) Chinese water torture (Wikipedia)

Well, there you have it: an even hundred! I’m sure I’m not alone in this borderline compulsion to have information at my literal fingertips, lest I forget something or don’t have time to fully explore it in the moment, though my husband claims it would push him to the brink of insanity to have that many browser windows open. What can I say? We all live chaotically in different ways. For example, he follows sports. Case closed.

PS. I’m going to close a lot of these, I swear. Except for a few, including #20 (obviously) and #65. Those must stay.

One of my favorite snacks, despite my mother’s insistence that it’s poisonous and has no business being allowed FDA approval, is an Orville Redenbacher single-serving bag of microwave popcorn. It’s just the perfect amount for one sitting and formulated exactly to my preference (the right amount of sodium, pronounced taste of actual corn, great crunch paired with a melty fluffiness, and no dripping “butter” or greasy fingers). It’s also warm and fresh but requires obscenely little effort to prepare, which is a bonus for people who spend a lot of time preparing food for others. Furthermore, for the first time in memory, we own a microwave on which the “popcorn” button actually worked, and though I have no idea how such a device can intuit how much time and power it needs to administer to yield perfect results every time, somehow it did.

Please notice the use of past tense in that last clause. For whatever reason, despite continuing to function optimally for larger bags of popcorn, one day the microwave just decided that the “popcorn” button, if used to cook a mini bag, would just incinerate its contents. I’m not talking a bit too brown, or a couple of burnt kernels. I’m talking blackened popcorn-shaped embers of carbon, accompanied by the kind of acrid smoke that smells like a reason to buy shares of stock in Yankee Candle. I thought perhaps it was a one-off, a weird glitch, but no; each time I tried to cook a mini bag of popcorn, the microwave came on way too strong. It was a little sad to realize that I’d already consumed my final perfect bag of popcorn without knowing it at the time. If only microwave would’ve bowed out gracefully, if not giving two weeks’ notice, at least flashing across its control panel some words of finality so I’d have known to savor the moment as such.

Anyway, I tried all sorts of different formulae to try to get results close to what once had been, finally settling on one minute and fifty-two seconds on high power as a benchmark for satisfactoriness (which, oddly enough, feels like a a word that’s barely adequate as a word). And then, one night, after one minute and fifty-two seconds, I took a bag of burned popcorn out of the microwave and googled “Yankee Candle market value”. From there, the variation continued, and it began to seem that the microwave cooked differently depending on how much use it had gotten that day. I started to think that if it were used a lot prior to popcorn-making, perhaps that would account for the amplified intensity when handling my delicate little mini bags, causing them to burn.

Enter Brian, fellow popcorn enthusiast, whose appetite is hearty enough to handle a full-sized bag. One night he went to make popcorn, and I asked him to let me make mine first so it would be less likely to burn. I bemoaned that the night before I’d tried one minute and fifty seconds, which underpopped it enough to render the amount slightly less than satisfying but not so small as to warrant cooking a second bag. Then he pointed out that a few nights earlier, he’d made his bag first and mine had come out better than usual afterward, positing a completely contrary theory to mine: maybe the microwave’s optimal functionality as it relates to my popcorn is actually favored by recently having been run for a full-sized bag. I told him to have at it, then, and guess what? Every time since, after he makes his bag then puts mine in directly, it cooks almost perfectly on one minute and fifty-one seconds.

This is really a reflection on how it feels to be married sometimes. Despite the annoyances and frustrations, the difficult conversations and disagreements, the confusions and contradictions and conflagrations, the seemingly endless laundry list of things we do that drive each other crazy, there is also symbiosis. In the maelstrom of figuring out how to cohabitate and coparent with a person who is your safe place to the point that it’s easy to treat him like a whipping boy, there are oases wherein thrives a reciprocity of personal betterment. Sometimes we need the counterpoint of each others’ perspectives and creative thinking to find solutions. Sometimes we need to troubleshoot and work through trial and error to settle on best practice. Sometimes we need to collectively skin our knees on circumstance to teach us a gentler way to walk through life together. And sometimes it’s enough to step back and realize that one person’s popcorn makes the other person’s popcorn so much better. In a world of inhospitable microwaves, which time after time over-promise and under-deliver, I’m grateful to have found a way past the popcorn button. But I never would’ve figured out how to get there on my own.