Unsolicited Advice

One of the more amusing family stories I sometimes tell is about a relative of mine, a few generations back, who moved in with another man after his wife died. Ooh , everybody goes. Salacious family gossip! Except the little town they moved to was actually Lily Dale Assembly , in upstate New York, which so far as I know is still one of the oldest continually running Spiritualist communes in the United States. Harry and Edward moved up there so that Edward, ex-model and former elder in the Presbyterian church, could start on what I think was his third career as a spirit medium. He channeled the spirit of an Edwardian actress named Lillie Langtry, also known as "the Jersey Rose". At this point, the whole 'shacked up with his boyfriend' thing has become the least interesting part of the story, and people begin to look at me funny. My parents fucked things up in many respects, several of them so egregious that I haven't spoken to them in years, but I want to g...

I've made an interesting discovery: The Eccentric is quite possibly the only person I've ever met who understands jealousy even less than I do. The Eccentric is, as implied by his pseudonym, very  eccentric. Mrs. Eccentric has made the occasional crack about him being from the Land of No Boundaries, but that isn't actually true. A lot of them are just in strange places, such that if you try to go casually lean on one expecting to find it in the usual spot you may end up tipping over and falling into a big confusing void. He is aware that he wants weird things out of life, and negotiates for them very directly, probably because he's realized that this is so beyond the norm that nobody is ever going to give him what he wants unless he tells them what it is. The first thing he made clear when we started talking about dance lessons was that he is VERY married, he was NOT looking to step out on his wife, and he did NOT want me to feel like I was being creeped on. I appre...

I finally caved and bought myself a pair of magic earplugs. I murder earbuds. I spent the years 1999-2016 inclusive destroying pair after pair of earbuds by getting the cord wrapped around something, or the bud caught under a heavy thing in the bottom of my bag, and yanking. I'm moderately fussy about earbuds in the same way I'm moderately fussy about shampoo -- which is to say, not very, but I do need something at least one step above cheap. My very favorite ones were Sony MDR-E9s, which were $10 a pair for a good ten years, and were absolutely everywhere until Sony broke my heart by discontinuing them. I ruined about a pair a month, on average. RIP, all my pretty blue earbuds. I graduated to Bluetooth earbuds when I got tired of knocking headphones off my noggin when practicing with my hoops. I tried braiding the wires (and at one point the actual Sansa Clip MP3 player) into my hair, but there's no way to do that and also keep the pads on or the earbuds in while I...