I’ve got a new pet peeve at the grocery store. It’s those warning labels on packages announcing that the product is super high in sodium or sugar, or some other terrible ingredient.

Being empowered to make “informed choices” sounds lovely until you remember that you live in a world that constantly crushes you with information and bombards you with choice. We are stuck in a food environment that is at odds with our evolution and benefits corporations who’ve learned how to highjack our taste buds. And now somehow that’s one more thing for me to feel responsible for? Not fair. And just one more reason for me to hate cooking.

It’s hard to believe that the terrible reign of COVID-19 started 6 years ago. The pandemic sometimes feels more like a world we went to than a time we lived through, and we don’t much like being reminded of that place or care to revisit it. Usually when the pandemic comes up in casual conversation, it’s all sighs and sentence fragments. We shake our heads and swiftly shift gears. It’s a lovely little trick of our human nature that we have trouble conjuring experiences of pain. But “the past is never dead. It isn’t even past,” William Faulkner once wrote. And whether we wish to speak any more of the pandemic or not, it continues, of course, to speak through us.

I’ve been separated from the father of my children for 6 years now. At this point separation has become old hat. Maybe too old hat cause I can’t really imagine myself in a relationship anymore. Sharing space with another adult? Being witnessed in my parenting? Trying to collaborate with them in parenting? Gah. Sounds like a lot. And a lot of relationships I see look like barely veiled co-dependence or simple inertia. Then there are the few that I do truly envy and admire. And I think how lucky for those folks. Because, though we don’t love to admit it, most of life is based on nothing loftier than luck.