Cardinal Post

I initially wrote this simply to process my anger, but since HBO neglected to immediately release a new series to distract me and work is slow this week, allow me to present you with this belated rant on the finale of the HBO limited drama series  The Undoing .  ********* Spoilers abound ********** The Undoing is based on a book, called You Should Have Known . (If this somehow implies that the adaptation is actually a satire of Prestige Dramas this is hilarious! Hats off to all involved, send me your address and expect an Edible Arrangement if that is still a business.) Anyway, I didn’t read the book. In the series, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant are a wealthy Upper East Side couple with a tweenaged son and a super involved father-in-law played by Donald Sutherland’s eyebrows.  In the first episode, Nicole attends a Private School Mom’s fundraiser meeting, where a new Scholarship Mom, Elena, breastfeeds while making direct eye contact with Nicole. Later, Elena is pr...

I've been trying to tell a holiday story about the ghosts of seasons past, but it's not cooperating. Like a lumpy box of lights I shoved in a closet last January, every memory I pulled out was tangled into another. And excuse the metaphor, but it’s the lights I keep coming back to.  I like lights. Blame it on the Celts, but I feel them in my soul this time of year. The aesthetic, the ritual, the skeleton outline of spindly branches across a darked town common; when they’re done right they bring me to a place of real, quiet joy. When they’re done wrong, I take it a little personally.   December 2006, the last weeks of the sheer-luck three month sublet I'd found across from Boston's Arboretum. All week was the screech of the T grinding into Government Center, the endless ring of the City Hall phones, the anxious buzz reminding me I had absolutely no idea what I was doing in this job and the clanging certainty that the disclosure of my fraud was imminent. The mornings, th...

As per my last post, I actually did write reviews of the movies I watched that first week home with Keanu. In an effort to post semi-regularly, I thought I'd share them, edited and expanded somewhat, while I finish up my next two pieces. Hustlers :  I was disappointed by this and went in REALLY wanting to like it. It starts strong and fun: Cardi B is there in giant pasties; a pre-ubiquity Lizzo rocks a cowboy hat and duct tape on her nipples. JLo is a physically impossible human being, and watching her be 50 is worth the whole movie, but halfway through it totally loses you*.  For whatever reason they needed to remind us this movie was based on a magazine article, so the whole thing is inexplicably structured like Interview with the Vampire and Julia Stiles is weirdly cast in the Christian Slater role. (The fact that's it's Julia Stiles is really distracting. How did she get here? Where has she been? Is this also a late 90s Shakespearean adaptation? Could they not get actua...

  Sleep used to be my superpower. When I was young I barely needed it, I could say yes to every invitation, attend every weird event and still show up to work in the morning. Most mornings. Sometime in my mid 30s I decided I was done going places and doing things and sleep became a priority. After so many years of playing hard to get, we settled into a very committed relationship that went undisturbed until the early morning hours of April 18, 2020. Keanu was born at 10:09am Friday, and at 2:00am Saturday I was still awake, watching him sleep in his little cot, suspended in a misty awe in that silent hospital, when my baby started to spit up. I rolled him onto his side and he expelled a mouthful of birth gunk without opening his eyes. It moved me like a flash flood: how fragile this little creature was, how responsible I am for the whole life of this tiny human. I thought of all the baby sea turtles flapping their way down the beach, how many of them get picked off before they make...

It’s October, and it’s been a spooky year, so I wanted to write you a ghost story. Since all the scariest things are true, I thought I’d make it a real one.  But it turns out, I have to tell you twice.  Part One Fifteen years ago, I moved to New Orleans with my friend, D.   We spent three days in a rental car with my mom, cold calling apartment listings out of the Gambit weekly, visiting one wrong place after another. We briefly considered a big two bedroom near campus, across from a graveyard. We thought: it’s New Orleans, the whole city is a graveyard, why be picky - but kept looking anyway.  Then we found the Palmer Avenue house: one side of a shotgun, about half a mile up from St. Charles. It had a low front porch with a swing, up the steps and inside to a living room, a den with a brick fireplace, a bedroom, the bathroom, another bedroom, the kitchen, all in a row. A shotgun: open the front door and shoot, your bullet sails right out the back without hitting a ...

  A million years ago I started a series of fictional reports about books I'd never read.  I wrote one on  Jane Austen , then one about Moby Dick, which I never posted because my dog died and I moved four times and Donald Trump was elected and I stopped writing for a while because I thought I could only write well when I was sad, or drinking, or it was late at night and I needed to talk to myself.  Over the last four years I started going to bed much earlier, became much happier, and stopped drinking entirely. In that order, which is a weird order, but it worked. Somewhere in that reset I got really superstitious and wondered if writing sad fiction influenced a sad reality. Hence the pause. I no longer think that's true.  But I've still never read Moby Dick.  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've never read Moby Dick. Six hundred pages of shattered ego and whale blubber. We wan...

I collect my friends' exes. They always break up with the girls that are perfect for me: the pastry chef, the ER doctor, the bookseller with the sweet dog, the cellist with the impossible hair. A dozen more. I stay with these women, on Facebook and Instagram; I celebrate their joys and mourn their losses. Some of them have stayed with me, too, some of them know more about me now than the men we befriended through. And some I simply haunt from behind the screen. I understand that we occupy different realms, I have to accept that what I hold on to as love might bring them nothing but pain. Maybe. Or maybe they miss me too. Maybe we attract the people who bring us ones we love. My own husband was originally a friend of a friend, the cool older guy who brought beer to a party. I shrugged him off for the boyfriend I was sure about then, the way you think everything is forever when you're 18. How often we’re just that close when we aim, a millimeter off the mark. That cool older guy ...