The Kinfolk Cookbook: Small Gatherings You’ll Likely Never Be Invited To
We beg for a reprieve from this waking life—from the alarm clocks that operate as instruments of torture (one morning it occurs to us that we could muffle the sounds of our ringtones with a mallet, but we decide against it, because our phones are our appendages and there are e-mails that require our immediate, 6:52 a.m. responses); the motley lot who test our sanity during an Odyssean commute that convinces us that purgatory is indeed real (and not of Dante’s mythic and poetic invention); the coworkers who are predators posing as house pets; the calls and meetings and crises (which are never really catastrophes, although we sometimes enjoy our own telenovelas) we navigate on tightrope; the bills that pile up and make us wonder why we even went to graduate school at all—we pray that today won’t be the day when we realize that this is our life.
We crawl out of bed, commute, eat at our desks, spend twelve hours in front of a computer, race to the gym, have the obligatory drink with friends in which we play therapist or life coach, inchworm to bed (if we’re lucky), and wake to do it all over again. Some of us can’t remember the last time we saw our children in daylight during the week.
For most of us, this is our life. Yet, at night, in the dark, or during the day, as we browse the Web, we create our…
