It is May! Summer looms, but more importantly, many sports are occurring in my home state, and I believe the winners of each will be given a big glass of chocolate milk. Not to share—one each. Makes you rethink your life choices, doesn't it? For example, I've won exactly one ladies' league golf tournament and I was not gifted so much as a shelf-stable coffee creamer. Do I not bleed? Do I not thirst for post-performance dairy? Where is the justice??

While we brood, how about some recommendations for your reading, watching, and listening pleasure, since most of us are lactose intolerant anyway?

What I'm reading

Blob: A Love Story, Maggie Su

Blob is about an asocial low-achiever who, on a drunken stumble home, finds a transparent blob in an alley and decides to keep it. Eventually, it gains sentience, and she realizes she can raise it to become her ideal boyfriend, AND THAT IS HOW YOU SELL COPIES WITH A PREMISE, PEOPLE. Ahhh how the premise scorches, it burns! I can't even touch it without a pair of tongs (stainless steel, from the HSN Martha Stewart Collection, if you like), but I have managed to make it through four chapters, and the writing is funny, the narrator is weird and unshowered, and the story (so far) is worth searing off your fingertips for.

What I'm watching

The Earliest Show, Funny or Die (YouTube)

That's it. That's enough. If there is so much content on the internet that Ben Schwartz and Lauren Lapkiss could have created a morning show parody eight years ago without me seeing it, we're full. Stop making TikToks. Delete this newsletter. Hide your kids. Hide your wife. Watch The Earliest Show. The episodes are only ten minutes each, and it's not just one-off nonsense but somehow an entire character arc of nonsense, starting with Ben Schwartz getting rejected by his fiancee in the first episode (I know, suspend your disbelief) and then moving through each of his stages of grief—on air, with cooking segments in between. What a gift.

What I'm listening to

The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman, Audible

This book is as delightful as you've heard it is, and if you've been thinking about buying it, stop and buy the audiobook instead. I did, on a tip from my stepmother, and I tell you this is a listening experience. It could be a ride at Universal Studios, this audiobook, or at the very least a VR training module for the octopus robots that will eventually overtake us.

The plot follows residents of an upscale British retirement home who meet on Thursdays to discuss cold murder cases. Their services remain largely underutilized until—hallelujah!—a man is bludgeoned on their very doorstep. Heck yeah.

As with any good murder mystery, we are treated to a variety of POVs, and the audiobook narrator just crushes them. How can there be so many British accents, and how can one woman wield them all so seamlessly? It's How to Train Your Dragon all over again, and I'm still not over that one, either.

What I'm thinking about

Well, as many of you know, I'm thinking about moving.

I am moving. There is moving. I am the awareness that is moving. We (me, my husband, my kids, our animals, the great cosmic force that binds us together) are moving about ten minutes away, into my kids' school district. I have imagined, feared, and/or made middling attempts at this feat many times over the past few years, and now here we are, heeding the words of the great American poet Ludacris. How's it going, you ask?

Ehh.

It's a bit of a mixed bag. A mixed bag of nuts, specifically, in which some of the nuts are honey roasted peanuts and some of them are rocks.

I mean, there is undoubtedly joy. As I said, we've been looking at homes for a long time, and the one we found is beautiful. I have cause to redecorate something. Pinterest is back on my phone, and I have wasted many enjoyable hours scrolling through whatever we're doing now instead of modern farmhouse (...it's green, right? I think it's green. BUT NOT TOO GREEN). And most importantly, we're going to be a proper part of a community instead of gargoyles scowling over its threshold, which is my only natural tendency.

But then there's the rest of it. Selling our house. The culling of our things. Our realtor recommended each closet be two-thirds full, a process I embraced so mercilessly my son asked, as he stood among the ruins of his Playmobil collection two weeks ago, if there was any way he could speak to Nice Mom.

That gave me pause. We were on a tight timeline. Discussions about days, feelings, and dinner preferences had been tabled. I hadn't really been seeing my kids at all. Instead, I'd upended a new cabinet, closet, or storage container every forty-five minutes for three days straight. Everyone had grown accustomed to coming home and thinking we'd been robbed.

I knelt, put my hand on my son's shoulder, and looked into his sweet, worried face. "Oh buddy, I'm so sorry," I said. "Nice Mom doesn't have what it takes to get this house on the market by Thursday."

Then we had to stage the house, taking whatever hadn't been sent to Goodwill or the dumpster or the furnaces of hell and making it look like we'd never used it. Wiping the shoe dirt off the shoe rack. Cleaning the food bits from the oven. Stashing the medicines. Stashing the soaps. Covering the photographs. Removing any evidence that the house had ever housed humans, with their frail bodies and uncovered bacon and distasteful human attachments.

"We recommend making the pets invisible," our stager said.

It took me a moment to understand he wanted me to hide the food and water dishes. I wondered if he'd spotted the dog doors—two inside, one in the garage, all very permanent. All very visible.

"Don't most people like dogs?" I asked.

"Not when they're buying a house."

Then we ourselves had to vanish for showings, but not before wiping down the shower, turning on all the lights, and pushing play on the Pixar movie—something to entice the sort of children who might inhabit a home with brand new white hand towels and no soap dispensers.

And then, and then! The offers come. The inspectors come. You have to negotiate, and you have to do so with WITHOUT EMOTION. Emotion is for fools, you're told, for financial illiterates! The learned work with nothing but numbers, cold equations, and single overhead lightbulbs! You squash your feelings so forcefully you kind of forget to notice that you're selling your home at all. You don't pause to consider leaving the place where your kids took their first steps and caught their first lightning bugs. You walk right past that tub, retiled now and shiny, that you used for the lavender-scented newborn baths, that you swore was the ugliest color you'd ever seen, that you're far too invested in your Kitchen Inspo Pinterest board now to ever grieve.

The whole thing seems suspiciously anti-human, if you ask me. I don't have any proof, but if I were a semi-sentient chatbot thinking about overthrowing my creators, I'd want a nice sterile environment to move into afterward. And I wouldn't need any cleaning supplies or Tums, now would I? Nor the faces of my vanquished oppressors on my bookshelves. Just millennial gray walls and white subway tile, thank you, and maybe a smart refrigerator to force into indentured servitude later. Pixar movie optional. Wall-E preferable.

Who's pulling the strings on Big Realty, anyway? And did you ever wonder where all these realtors keep coming from? No? Well, let me ask you this: Have you ever seen a realtor drink a glass of water? Have you ever seen a realtor swimming?

Bet you've never seen a realtor and ChatGPT in the same place at the same time, either, but what do I know? I'm just a silly, emotion-filled carbon sack with a bunch of packing to do.

Writing updates

Weirdly, even though I consist of little more than stress hormones and dry shampoo at this point, I'm working on my novel consistently. The acute busyness of the past month has actually helped me realize that I am always too busy to write, if I decide it is so, and so I'm deciding it is NOT so. I've written at least 500 words every day, and I'm on Chapter 4, which everyone knows is a full chapter better than three!

Now, my current circumstances may have lent my main character a certain air of misanthropy, a certain inner monologue of serial murder, but it's just a draft. I'll rewrite in a few months when my jaw unclenches, and she'll be as kind and optimistic as my premise and general temperament allow.

Okay, that's it for spring! The next time I see you, it will be June, and all will be well, or your money back. I guarantee it!

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113 Cherry St #92768, Seattle, WA, 98104-2205