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Pantsless Weirdo


Unfocused Essays from My Basement

Farm cats

October 6, 2013


When you live in a farmhouse, cats tend to just appear. They show up two, three, seven at a time and suddenly you have a veritable army of semi-feral cats living all around your property. They form alliances and develop systems of government and kill a ton of mice. Sometimes it starts with just one swollen mama ...

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Vacation and my big brother

October 3, 2013


Today I should have boarded a plane to fly to Seattle, Washington. See, I have a half brother. He lives in California. He is one of my favorite people in the entire world, though we did not spend a great deal of time together when I was a child. I vaguely remember him being present ...

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on writing

October 2, 2013


My last post was actually supposed to contain a hilarious anecdote about my time living at that farmhouse with my dad and all the critters I had and how he helped me deal with the loss of pets as a child. But I got so caught up in the backstory that I never got there. ...

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daddyo

October 1, 2013


When I was a child, I was undeniably a Daddy’s Girl. I have always been a lot like my father, typically quiet and stubborn and restless. My parents divorced when I was six years old, and my mom decided to move with her new boyfriend and us girls from Central Illinois all the way to ...

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You are beautiful

September 30, 2013


I realize that my past several posts have contained some pretty serious warm and fuzzy undertones. Or they have at least ended with some like-a-Phoenix-from-the-ashes life lesson. I don’t mean to be nauseating. After my post about road rage, I figured I owed it to the universe to cool my jets a little bit. And ...

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butty butt do

September 28, 2013


I was born in Decatur, Illinois at Decatur Memorial Hospital and I lived there with my family until I was not quite seven years old. My parents split up when I was five or six and divorced a bit later, and the house of which I have only fleeting memories was foreclosed on sometime after ...

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The Spirit of Depression

September 26, 2013


“It’s a spirit,” she said. “Depression is a spirit and it fills your head with lies. I rebuke those lies right now and send them straight back to hell where they came from, and I bind that spirit in the name of Jesus.” She did that when she was serious about doing battle for the people ...

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brokeback: the diagnosis

September 20, 2013


Not quite three years ago, my dog became inexplicably lame. She suddenly couldn’t walk. It was December and I was at the tail end of finals as well as embroiled in endless holiday parties at the fine dining restaurant where I worked. I had left Joseph and her bff Jack at my then-boyfriend’s house when ...

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lemon

September 18, 2013


Sometimes you get a car where nothing goes right with it, the kind of car where every time you turn around there is something else wrong, some other thing that needs fixed or addressed or dealt with. You sort of want to drive the car off a cliff, or at least take it back to ...

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road rage tourettes

September 15, 2013


Usually I don’t have a lot of passengers, save for the dog when she’s not on crate rest. Rarely do I have human passengers, and this has become increasingly true in the past few years. This is and has always been especially true of road trips. Since I first obtained my license at seventeen, I ...

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Congrats, you made it to the end! Once more with feeling.