Graduation season is upon us, and I’ve been feeling envious of all the high school seniors who have been building their resumes since middle school. Having a resume at 17 would have seemed farfetched to me because I got a late start at everything in life -- except having babies, which began in my teens. As far as careers go, I’ve followed an erratic, wandering path that might have been laid out by an engineer on LSD. I didn’t start college until I was 29 and already bringing up those aforementioned kids. After I graduated, I went from a job as a secretary, to a promotion to editor at a publishing company, and eventually to landing down on my luck in Charleston (that’s a whole other story) to work as a chambermaid in an historic inn. Next, I clerked in a liquor store with a deeply depressed parrot for company, cleaned house for a drug dealer, and waitressed at the beach. After that, a job as a receptionist at a direct-mail t-shirt company morphed into writing apocryphal stories about mythical Irish pubs to market their shirts and tavern signs to Irish-American families across the country. Later, I started and sold a magazine, and along the way became an honorary Kentucky Colonel (of which there are 250,000 so it doesn’t even get me a ticket to the Derby) and co-wrote a book titled PMS: Problems Men Started ( which disappeared so quickly and thoroughly that I’ve never even seen it in used bookstores, thank god). If I had to create a resume today, I’m afraid everything I've done would have to be shoved under the heading of Miscellaneous. Anyone looking for a Parrot Wranger? 

“What is Medusa’s story if not a tale of a woman going to the ends of the earth to be left alone and men showing up to piss her off anyway.” I found this on the Instagram account of poet Nikita Gill (@nikita_gill) and thought “Hell yeah—I have to read more.” I had discovered Gill’s poem “93 Percent Stardust” a while ago and tacked it to my office wall, but I’d never read any of her other poems until recently. Her “Affirmation for Days of Self Loathing” and “Reasons to Live through the Apocalypse” are a couple of my favorites.

I’ve written before about the embarrassing stockpile of unread books in my house, but now I have further reinforcement for maintaining that hoard from an article on the concept of the “anti-library.” The theory is that “everyone should have a shelf filled with books that they haven’t read, because this keeps them intellectually curious and humble (by reminding you that there’s so much you don’t know yet).” I periodically pare down my own library by donating many of the books I’ve read to the annual library sale, but still the stacks accumulate. According to the books patiently awaiting my attention, I still don’t know much yet about Cary Grant, epigenetics, gardening, writing, time and time travel, Lewis & Clark, English weather, alchemy, and the Arctic. And that’s just the tip of my anti-library iceberg.

I admit that I’m lazy, but Trader Joe’s packaged salads ensure I at least get some minimal greens in my diet. I’ve been a fan of the Southwest Chopped Salad for a long time, but now I’m a little obsessed with their Lemony Arugula Basil Salad Kit. I don’t use the little envelopes of “stuff” that comes in the package, but I do like the dressing. In very small doses.

 I’m on fire to download the first book in Don Winslow’s new trilogy, City on Fire, to my Kindle,  because I’m a sucker for mob stories and tales inspired by Greek myths. Winslow’s anti-tyranny videos encouraged me during the bad, dark years, and I admire that he’s done them mostly on his own dime and time. He’s an American hero in the deepest sense of the word, and now that he’s retiring from writing (after finishing this trilogy), I hope he’ll be even more active in the struggle to save democracy.