Meg Schmidt (’16) graduated after studying writing and art history. Her interests include attempting to cook paleo, reading through McBrien’s Lives of the Popes, and landing the wittiest joke in a conversation. She currently works with Eerdmans Publishing as a Graphic and Production assistant.
Notice one morning that your orchid is starting to look strained. Pick up the fallen petals. Water it, but know that this, like a leprous spot, is a sign of the beginning of the end, and that from now on, water will merely prolong the inevitable.
But here are the deer, following the prodigal pattern. And me—well, I’ve been watching from the window for them this whole time.
The last thing I want to read about is another long and beautiful and solitary walk.
I had opened up the pomegranates in the first place for the deep red, and dropped the sparkling contents onto a bed of mango and blueberries and lime.
You want to talk about how to teach young girls to love themselves? Or to believe that their bodies are temples, and not objects of shame?
Now we’re nearing the end of year three, and I’m happy to say that while we haven’t quite stopped having conflicts about the small things, we’ve at least stopped feeling ashamed about them.
Sisyphus may roll his stone, but I have my morning alarm.
be with every late night job-searcher, every too-old-for-internships-er, all of us just looking for a step in the door. Be with the waiters who aren’t scientists yet, the sales clerks who aren’t published yet.
I was explaining this to a friend once when he informed me that cheering—or jeering—at a crowd was all about group community. “We rise and fall together, we yell and cry together.”
Lilith cries out to God that he made her from filth, so what else did he expect from her? And so it was Lilith I thought of when I realized how bad things had become.
It’s not the kitchen I imagined. In fact, it’s nowhere near the kitchen I imagined.
But there’s no place I’m happier in.
When I was eleven, the barn cat we kept outside to catch mice had kittens.
I’m discovering that if one is to read aloud, one should pick up a murder mystery.
I think everyone has childhood hurts that they carry with them, and these are mine.
I simply feel that I could make a few very small and practical changes that would improve our situation greatly.
10 / The Office will have ended when Jim and Pam got married.
A few weeks ago, Grandma fell in her bedroom. She pulled a bookcase down on top of her, breaking several ribs and pushing her further down “the road” than she had been before.
“Mature reaction to a routine colonoscopy: HE’S GOING TO STICK A TUBE SEVENTEEN THOUSAND FEET UP YOUR BUTT.”
I’d like your advice on this, because I’m not sure if I’ve done the right thing.
So I understand the benefits of the simple, unfussy communion of my childhood. It’s much neater, less ripe with possibilities for awkwardness.
But so often the story would rise up and out of me, and I couldn’t find it again. And I wouldn’t really try.
Today, he is known as “the father of gynecology” and is loved for—as his statues say—“treating empress and slave alike.”
6 / A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning, by Lemony Snicket. In preparation for the Netflix adaption.
Take two balls of dough out from the fridge. Roll out both on the kitchen counter. Don’t bother trying to form a perfect circle, only God could manage that.
You may not have realized this, but the world came very close to ending last Sunday night.
The fun sexy couple that is totally giving you the side eye and feeling really, really uncomfortable because you are just standing there.
My father walks the meadow in the early morning.
And this, dear reader, is why I think we Americans love to watch The Bachelorette. We love to look at those who have it all.
We had been bearing all of these trials patiently enough, however, until the day the toilet started belching. I want you to imagine what that must sound like, and after you have, I want you to imagine me hearing those sounds alone in the apartment—which coincidentally, did not contain a plunger.
