Author: Jocelyn

  • “Suffering From Twinklementia: Color Me Ronnie”

    Zoom in on 1997: One day, having just slammed a triple-shot mocha in an effort to fight off a marauding hoard of the late-afternoon grumps, I made a new friend. As I exited the coffee shop, a woman–a stranger to me–came up and said, “I see you all the time around here, and you always […]

  • Ehhhh? I Cain’t Hear You ‘Lessin’ I Turn Up My Hearing Aid

    Here’s a statement that most everyone–outside of perky cheerleader Homecoming Queens, Buzz Lightyear, Paris Hilton, Lassie, and Barack Obama–can agree with: “I’ve spent a large part of my life feeling not cool but wishing I were.” Certainly, my desire to be “cool” has steadily and mercifully waned since high school ended, and my standards of […]

  • Will Shortz and a Gold-Lame’ Bikini

    Speaking of why parents worry that the schools won’t be able to unlock their kids’ particular gifts… Yesterday, my three-year-old son, Wee Niblet, draped me a big poncho of goosebumps, with one, random comment. We were getting out of the car, on our way to a running store to buy Byron’s birthday present (how Norwegian […]

  • Every Rose Has Its Thorn

    My freshman year of college, I watched 40 people recoil in horror when I announced at the first floor meeting in my dorm: “And I really like heavy metal, especially Ozzy.”Soon enough, after four years of being exposed to the folksy Midwest, I outgrew my good-ol’ hardcore Montana musical roots, but the truth is that […]

  • The Original Cheap Date

    A couple of weeks ago, on October 31st, The Groom and I volunteered to be readers at our daughter’s school; the school celebrates a “Harvest of Literature” that day because to actually say the word “Halloween” would have meant that the place was run by Satan worshippers looking to inculcate the small minds into the […]

  • Daytime Pain and Nighttime Soap

      Call me predictable, even stereotypical: I dread going to the dentist. Sure, Dentist Person may be a very nice individual, well-qualified, and gentle of touch, but I still don’t like him/her. Me no want to see Dentist Person.The deal is that Dentist Person has tools–tiny pickaxes, long needles, shrill drills, and that weird Mr. […]

  • Twenty-Eight First Graders, the Lone Teacher, a Slew of Specialists, and One Shy Girl

     Anne Lamott once wrote of a type of situation so taxing it could “…make Jesus drink gin from the dog dish.” This is how I often feel, as the parent of a school-aged child. It’s surprisingly hard to let my kid go off all day to be manhandled by the world. It makes me want […]

  • No So Much My Saviour After All: The Pompous Lord

    I feel it. Pulsing towards me through cyberspace, I sense your desire to read more of my rambling adventures in other countries. Or maybe what I sense is just my computer trying to stream this week’s episode of Ugly Betty to me, but I’m choosing instead to read this communication from abc.com as a psychic […]

  • Scoundrel Cabbies: So Unfare

    “Scoundrel Cabbies: So Unfare”This past weekend, I had to don a big mohair sweater of The Happies, as I spent four days in the mountains of Colorado, celebrating past, present, and future with two of my best galpals from college. To even divulge how long it’s been since I first met these women requires that […]

  • Metallic Love

    “Metallic Love” I guess it started the night I met my husband, a very dreamy evening. It wasn’t meant to be dreamy, for we were set up, meeting each other “blindly,” as the rhetoric goes. But we were matched by my cousin, who had asked each of us if he could serve as our “agent […]