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Nostalgia Food
About once a year, something will come over me and I’ll buy a can of sardines and eat them in one sitting. I don’t particularly like sardines. I don’t dislike them, either. It’s just that they remind me of my grandmother. When I was little, not yet of school age, my mother would drop me…
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Floating Man Caves
On the day of this writing, I’m working on the South Park Bridge, which spans the Duwamish River from Seattle to Tukwila, Washington. It’s a beautiful day. As locals say, “the mountain is out,” which means I can see Mount Rainier on the horizon. (God, but I love my job.) It must also be the…
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Photo Closure
Recently, this haunting picture made the rounds of Facebook. And now I can’t get it out of my head. I’ve tried to track this photo down through Google image search, and it directs me to what appears to be a Turkish blog, but I don’t actually see the photo there. It also pops up…
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The Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp? Seriously?
In the interests of full disclosure, I’m not a particularly big sports fan. I tend to shy away from things that encourage any form of us vs. them (now more than ever). But when I heard that my old home town of Jacksonville, Florida was changing the name of its minor league baseball team to…
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Merry Unbirthday
Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, is a controversial figure. Did he write the book while under the influence of drugs? According to this article, modern scholars seem to be of the impression that this wasn’t the case. And yet you’d be hard-pressed to overlook the drug symbolism, whether it be intentional or not.…
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Danish Juleneg
I am proud of my Danish heritage, and now that I’ve moved to Seattle, I have a unique opportunity to learn more about it, and add more Danish traditions into my life. Seattle has a very big Nordic community, and even a Nordic Heritage Museum that has a Yulefest every year on the weekend before…
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Marriage. Ugh.
I love my friends. Truly I do. But I must admit that I’m happy to have the excuse of living all the way on the other side of the continent from most of them, because this way I can tactfully avoid weddings. Weddings generally give me migraines, because I can feel the stress and tension…
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The Bare Bones of a Tradition
Independence Day is one of my very favorite holidays because it doesn’t come with any pressure. In-laws don’t fly in. There’s no need to buy gifts. The dust bunnies can continue to reside languorously under the bed. You don’t even have to cook if you don’t want to. You can make it as elaborate or…
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Avoidance Practices
I used to date someone long ago whose mother was… well… weird. And by that I mean really, really odd. Her concept of reality was so skewed that you never knew where she was coming from. Her children used to make fun of her behind her back, which made me extremely uncomfortable, but I tried…
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The Birthday Chair
It’s funny sometimes how you entirely forget things that used to loom so large in your life. When I was very small, my mother used to have this delightful tradition on our birthdays. She would allow us to sit at the head of the table in a tall backed chair which she had decorated with…