You Haven’t Driven in Texas Until You’ve Driven a Pickup
To spend decades cruising across Texas yet never slide behind the sturdy wheel of a big ol’ pickup shows a certain defiance on my part. It’s like not watching football, not listening to country music, or not wearing cowboy boots, all of which are check, check, check for me. Part of my rebellion was to shape myself in counter-formation to Texas stereotypes. You could also say I was a new breed—a city girl pampered by modern conveniences, more familiar with grazing the sales rack at Dillard’s than horses grazing the open prairies. I once showed up to a working farm in a skirt and platform flip-flops, which is not very Texan but is painfully Dallas.
What the Pandemic Taught Me About Old-Fashioned Romance
I checked Hinge in mid-March, curious to see what dating looked like in the social-distancing era. I wondered if the unfolding crisis would change how we engaged—maybe our new circumstances would make men more patient or conversations more dramatic, shaking up interactions that had become predictable and mundane. In recent years I’d had stray thoughts like The only thing that could save this broken dating culture is a giant asteroid. Well, one just hit.
How the Pandemic Turned Brene Brown Into America’s Therapist
The week we lost the world we knew, Brené Brown held church. Wearing a floral blouse and hoop earrings, she settled into her home office, in Houston, in front of a bookcase with spines arranged by color: cerulean blue and daffodil yellow and blush pink. She livestreamed a fifteen-minute service, Brené Brown–style: There was a prayer, yes, but also a Beatles sing-along. There was God talk but also cussing. And there was a sermon about offering grace to anyone you might like to punch in the face.
Parking in Dallas is the worst and I have the dings, scrapes to prove it
The black SUV was a Lexus, I’m sorry to report, and the shiny back haunch of the passenger side had a white comet perhaps 2 inches long. My car is red, so that white comet could have been made by anybody — that white comet could have come with the car — but I leaned in and spied a thin stripe of red over a thin line of black, gradients in the larger astral shape. My car, coincidentally, had a black stripe over the driver’s side wheel now. So, twinsies.
The New Frontier of Fertility Tests — for Younger Women
Our biology had evolved so that young, hearty people would reproduce early and often, but Western culture had evolved so that young, hearty people could attend college, travel and make interesting mistakes and pursue meaningful careers, binge drink and Instagram their funny donuts and dick around on the Internet without feeling weighed down by the pressures of children. Did they even want kids? Maybe, maybe not. And all this lush and leafy indecision turns out to be perfectly fine if the answer is “not.” But for many of us, the answer was strongly the opposite, and yet this discovery was arriving right around the time our reproductive systems were closing down shop.
Why Every Woman Should Take a Solo Road Trip
I wonder if such a small act of freedom will be unfathomable to future generations. You know, when robots have taken over and no one actually drives anymore, and we all just plug into the cloud of immersive reality or something. I wonder if stories like this one will sound as impossibly ancient as the pioneer wagons did to me when I was growing up in the ’80s, flipping through old-timey Westerns on the couch with a sleeve of Ritz crackers in my lap. Long ago, little girl, there was a thing called a road trip, and brave Americans took to the interstates in a machine filled with gas and good guesses—not because they had to, but because they could.
Blackouts Aren’t Funny or Impressive. They’re an Epidemic
Punching walls. Punching friends. Punching girlfriends. All questionable manner of verbal and sexual assault. DUIs, jail terms, divorces. I’ve heard it all, and I can promise you that none of them are like that awesome tiger scene in The Hangover. That 2009 buddy comedy has probably done more than any other movie to elevate the fantasy of oblivion drinking into hilarious hijinks. But in real life, the hangovers are not so fun. The terror of blackouts is that you don’t know what you’ve done. You become an unreliable narrator in your own life. But just because you don’t remember something doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for it.
Kavanaugh and the Blackout Theory
Inside those haunted words I see a life and a trail of damage that could have been my own. I consider it nothing but a gift of biology, or temperament, or sexual dynamics that I never had to worry I had physically or sexually assaulted anyone in a blackout. I worried I was rude. I worried I was weird, dumb, deathly unsexy. As I grew older, and more risk-taking, I worried I’d had sex with someone I didn’t know, a not-uncommon experience in my own daily calendar. But I have known men who drank too much, and I have loved them, and this is a fear that beats in their private hearts. I hope I didn’t hurt her.
How Whitney Wolfe Herd Is Changing the Dating Game
Eventually I would learn [Bumble’s] small inversion of courtship was quite controversial. People had all kinds of theories on what it meant for the shifting roles of men and women, the spread of online jackassery, and the nature of sex and desire itself. That night, though, I wasn’t thinking about any of those things. There was a cute guy on the other side of that screen, and in the small and sparkling afterglow of our mutual match, I felt something all too rare in the dating game. Hope.