Reading… I’m actually still slowly making my way through Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable. Her essay on being someone who loves animals perhaps a little too much really hit home for me. Can we talk about the fact that I tear up at lost cat posters? Or maybe not. It might make me cry.   Watching… Re-watching New Girl. I needed a sitcom-y palette cleanser. I’ve been tired this week. I loved the early seasons just as much upon re-watching them. I’ve just reached the point where I stopped watching last time because I was starting to feel kind of “meh” about the whole series, so we’ll see how things go from here on…

I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal. — Jane Austen, letter December 24, 1798

Reading… The Unspeakable and Other Subjects of Discussion by Meghan Daum. When I discover a writer I genuinely like, I have a tendency to dig deep into their body of work. My interest in Daum started with a piece in Harper’s Bazaar about choosing not to have kids. Then it was the collection of essays on the same topic, edited by Daum. Next I finally picked up her personal essays. In what is perhaps an illogical or contrary approach, I started wit the most recent collection first. The writing is fantastic. It is easy to see why Daum is lauded as a master of the personal essay. Her unflinching, at…

If you know me at all, you know I am a self-professed musical theatre junkie. I even occasionally flirt with the idea of ditching grad school and running away to join Broadway. An impractical life plan if there ever was one, but one that has appealed to me in some way or another for as long as I can remember. As a result, I think about the practicalities of life in musical theatre more than most, and I am particularly interested in the role of age in stage productions. How old is too old to play a role? Could I, creeping up to 30, convincingly play the teenage Natalie in Next…