SPARKS OF JOY 0:00 / 0:00 Sparks of Joy My Facebook feed is full of photos of shipshape garages, orderly closets and neatly stacked undies. Marie Kondo, an organizing consultant, encourages people to sort their belongings. And, if an object does not spark joy, toss it. Some of my belongings do not elicit a spark […]
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FLYING ATTACK OWLS Courtesy of The Daily Progress 0:00 / 0:00 Flying Attack Owls As a child, I never wanted to sleep in a room with an open closet door. When I was about five, my parents took us to visit friends in Buffalo, New York. I bunked with Jimmy, also about five, who pointed
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LEAVE NO TRACEMOVIE REVIEW My husband and I watched Leave No Trace last night. He hated it. He thought the movie was bleak and sad. He felt furious with the father during the entire film. I loved the movie—the nuanced acting, the plot, the camerawork, the casting choices, the understated and unexpected way that the screenwriters,
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IF BEALE STREET COULD TALKMOVIE REVIEW Every Friday, I read the movie reviews in The Washington Post.The articles usually help me find great films and steer away from bad ones, with one notable exception: Adam Sandler’s Punch Drunk Love. They liked it. I loathed it and loath is too nice a word for how I
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VIRGIL WANDERBOOK REVIEW I have the attention span of a fruit fly. Whether in a movie or book, pacing is important to me. When a movie is slow, I’ve been known to hit fast forward, then read the subtitles as I zoom to the end. Virgil Wanderstarts slowly, but I hung in through the first
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WORDS YOU NEVER WANT TO HEAR 0:00 / 0:00 Words You Never Want to Hear A couple of weeks ago, at the end of a cut, my stylist said, “Hmm…your hair looks strange.” A week of high humidity had made me resemble a poodle. Perhaps that’s what she meant. As you might imagine, her statement
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ON THE ADVISABILITY OF SWEARING 0:00 / 0:00 Swearing Recently, after four attempts, a TSA agent failed to collect a non-fuzzy image of my fingerprints. No matter how firmly I pressed and no matter how I positioned my hand, the device would not record my prints crisply. Maybe I should be grateful. My inability to
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LIVING FOREVER 0:00 / 0:00 Living Forever My dad died a few years ago. Even though he needed a pacemaker to regulate his heart and he was a brittle, non-compliant diabetic, his death still shocked us. Often, my father would start a sentence, “If I ever die….”–as if the inevitability of his death was nota foregone
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IF I WAS YOU 0:00 / 0:00 If I Was You In my hip hop class, we dance to a Meghan Trainor song whose lyrics are: “If I was you, I would wanna be me, too. I would wanna be me, too.” People perk up during this song. We’re more likely to strut, rather than
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A QUIET PLACEMOVIE REVIEW I do not like horror movies. They scare me. Until recently, I’ve only watched two in my life: The Haunting of Hill Houseand The Sixth Sense. Here is a terrifying clip from The Haunting of Hill House. Don’t watch it. The scariest scene in The Sixth Sense is when kitchen cabinets
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