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Katie Arrosa

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Featured Post

The foreign aura of the passenger seatbelt light

After he retired, my maternal grandfather drove by himself (for fun) through every state in the US except Hawaii. He eventually got a Winnebago RV when he got really old, but for thousands of those logged miles, he slept in a tiny road-bungalow setup in the capped bed of a Chevy S10 pickup. That’s hard as shit! I wish I was that tough! My grandfather was an argumentative, stubborn, prickly person (and by multiple accounts, a real humdinger of a rat bastard) who did everything his own way to a...

over 1 year ago • 7 min read

One of the most lovely parts of a vacation, favorite holiday, or special event is the booking, excited research, and Christmas-Eve feeling of God, this is gonna be so great! Most folks have to plan travel well in advance to get decent rates, time the visit perfectly to weather considerations and the reason they're going, and navigate around obligations. That gives most people weeks or months to daydream about how awesome of a time they're gonna have. That said! This truism is also popular:...

over 1 year ago • 3 min read

I heard a fun (and instructive!) anecdote a while back from an exhausted mom of rammy teenage boys. She was feeling under-appreciated for keeping the homestead tidy and running smoothly. One day, she did a top-to-bottom house cleaning - kitchen, bathrooms, windows, vacuuming, putting stray items away - and lit a scented candle to tie her huge effort in a white bow. When her big boys crashed through the front door from whatever sports practice or hellraising they had just wrapped up, she said...

over 1 year ago • 6 min read

HBO produces excellent shows. This is news to nobody. Some of my favorite series I've ever watched have been HBO ones. A friend just introduced me to HBO Max's newest comedy, The Rehearsal, which stars Nathan For You's Nathan Fielder. Nathan expends absurdly overthinking, over-the-top effort to help real people prepare for big moments. He coaches them through rehearsing every single outcome so no spontaneous changes in the wind will catch them off-guard. In the first episode, he preps an avid...

almost 2 years ago • 5 min read

First of all, today's my birthday! Please congratulate me on keeping myself alive for another calendar year! So plenty has happened since we last spoke - Comcast laid me off from my full-time technical-writing role on May 12. They did something I've never experienced before where the termination wasn't effective right on the spot - they gave me 60 days starting now to find another job within Comcast. That period expires July 12, and it's almost a sure thing at this point that I'm not going to...

almost 2 years ago • 4 min read

I LOVE pro wrestling. We have an on-again, off-again relationship, though - since the late 80s, I've watched wrestling like an OBSESSED FREAK for long periods and then lost touch with it for a few years at a time. I always come back because pro wrestling is the funniest sport on Earth and it's not even close. Watching enraged human cartoons with long wet hair shout at and beat the shit out of each other brings me a joy flirting with hysteria. This pact I have with pro wrestling - I'll always...

about 2 years ago • 4 min read

I hope most of us have had this formative experience in some flavor: It's 1995, I'm 15 years old, and I'm at a daily brink of collapse from the isolating pressure and loneliness of being in high school: I care painfully about what my peers think of me I don't have any close friends My Catholic high school condemns every single thing I think is awesome I'm freaking out studying for the SATs so I don't fuck up the rest of my life My parents seem to hate me I don't fit right anywhere, and I feel...

about 2 years ago • 11 min read

Jim's grandmother died a few weeks ago. She was ONE HUNDRED EIGHT AND A HALF YEARS OLD. How does anyone born at the tail end of the 20th century make a lifespan like that make any sense at all? I'm 41 - when Rita (not her real name) was my age, Bill Haley and the Comets recorded and released their hit single Rock Around the Clock. Additional context about what it means to leave the party at 108 in 2022 - she was literally just here - Rita was: Born the year before WWI started 4 years old when...

about 2 years ago • 5 min read

Summer 1986 One stale and sweaty Saturday afternoon, 6-year-old me slunk around a noisy family gathering at my aunt Kathleen's crowded house in South Jersey looking for a place to hide. The adults screamed happily at each other in the 80s-brown kitchen, ignoring the flock of shrieking kids in the 80s-brown family room. I hated loud parties as a kid, and I still do now. But I was a reasonably self-sufficient person, so I got busy poking around for quiet stuff to do or read by myself until it...

about 2 years ago • 5 min read

On the morning of Valentine's Day 1992, a modest flower arrangement materialized on the front porch of my childhood home. The tiny card attached was addressed to ME and signed: your secret admirer. The intrigue. Who could this be who found 11-year-old me so beguiling? Maybe John, the hot older boy who lived in the house behind me? Tim, the redheaded kid down the street? Someone from school? The fun wasn't as much about actually nailing this culprit but in speculating, who is this? The...

over 2 years ago • 6 min read
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