The Creative Nest

My coworker told me the other day she has over twenty tattoos and my face did a thing I didn't authorize. Just a full system reboot, right there in the break room, next to a microwave that smells like last Thursday's soup. Twenty. That's not a decision anymore. That's a subscription. She showed me a few. A little one on her wrist — a wave, or possibly a slug, hard to tell under the fluorescent lights. Something small on her ankle. She's thirty and the ink looks great on her, honestly. Crisp black lines sitting exactly where they're supposed to sit. And instead of my brain saying "nice," it started doing arithmetic. What happens to twenty tattoos at seventy? Because skin does not stay the way it leaves the factory. It sags and it spots, and it bruises if you look at it funny. I've been looking at my own arms funny for a decade. So picture me at seventy-eight with twenty-plus tattoos. The dolphin on my hip — a majestic creature in 2011 — has spre...

Quick question, and I need you to actually sit with it even though you're probably holding a sandwich: when you picture yourself at eighty-something, what's there? Don't be shy. Nobody's grading this. I'll go first, since I clearly have no dignity left to protect. When I picture myself at eighty, I see a woman with strong opinions about a checkout clerk's hair. Not loud opinions. Worse — quiet ones, saved up and delivered later to whoever's stuck in the passenger seat. Did you see that girl's bangs. They were doing two different things. Here's the thing I keep chewing on. I assume I'll mellow. That somewhere around seventy-two a draft will get through a window and blow the hard edges off me. But I've met older women who did not mellow, and honestly they seemed fine with it. There's a woman at my grocery store who wears a visor indoors and critiques the melons out loud. She isn't cruel. She's just... unmonitored. I think that...

Look, I need to ask you something. Do you think dogs should sleep in the bed with their owners? Before you answer, I should tell you that I absolutely think they should. In fact, I was so committed to this belief that I went ahead and bought my dog a set of pet stairs. Not because I was being fancy, but because the dog in question is a thirteen year old sausage of pure muscle with legs the length of a soup can. One day I watched her try to leap onto my bed and it looked less like a graceful jump and more like a bowling ball trying to clear a curb. So, out of pure self preservation for both of us, I bought these stupid little carpeted steps and plopped them next to my bed. Oh boy. What a choice that was. I thought I was setting up a nice little system. She'd trot up, hop in, and we'd both snuggle into the kind of peaceful sleep people write about in those calendars with puppies on them. I did not, not once, consider that I had just installed a dog escalator with no off switch...