Perforation Problems

"I like how productive we are when we're together," Sarah says. "We decide we want to do something and we do it."  We're sitting at Lulu's Coffee + Bakehouse on the northside on a sunny Thursday afternoon, Sarah nursing a hangover and me trying to figure out what spices are on the spiced walnuts in my salad. They're delicious. It's the third new coffee shop we've visited this summer in our tour of new writing locations. So far we haven't written as much as we'd planned, but I've certainly had a lot of lattes.  We've just resolved to stop checking Facebook until Monday. It's the result of many a discussion about how addicted we are to the platform, how it encourages narcissism, how you can get lost in your Facebook feed and not notice an hour's gone by. I use Facebook just as much as any normal person in 2016, and I wish I didn't. I've got especially negative feelings towards it at the moment because an o...

"Michael and I are going to try clean eating." I drop it into the conversation casually as we're making strawberry jam from the strawberries we picked that morning. It's a yearly tradition. My mother looks at me sideways and makes a noise I'll describe as a scoff, though I'm not sure how intentional it is. "Clean eating?" I rush to downplay it. "Yeah, mostly just looking at labels and trying to avoid anything that's too processed. Just to try to eat healthier." "Does that mean no Dairy Queen blizzards?" She laughs. "Yeah, no Dairy Queen blizzards." I know why she brings up Dairy Queen blizzards. They're a staple of summer, a treat we get on the way home from my grandparents' lake house to make ourselves feel better about having to leave the lake and go back to real life. It's not that my mom is against eating healthy – she and my dad have been eating better over the last few years and she in gen...