Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

There are dozens of books, magazines and blogs giving baby advice, so here's mine, based on almost six weeks with one baby. So, you know, there's that. Dance, baby, dance But I've been feeling nostalgic already, so let me relate what I learned in this first six weeks. Here are 10 things to do in the first weeks after baby comes. 1. Heal. This is #1 and above #2 for a reason. Whether you had a c-section like me or had a vaginal birth, your body has some physical healing to do. Add to that what one friend called a hormonal hangover and a lot of powerful emotions and you've got a lot of working on yourself to do. And while someone else can lend a helping hand with baby, no one can take a nap for you, hydrate for you, take medications for you, or shower for you. This goes for mental health, too--take the Edinburgh post-partum depression test , which was given to me at every doctor's appointment, mine or baby's, and before I left the hospital, and seek heali...

The Adriatic Sea: The Closest I've Come to Croatia At the risk of sounding like an insufferable hipster, I've liked Croatia before it was cool. Heck, I liked Croatia when it was still Yugoslavia. Maybe it was that hottie Goran Visnjic as Dr. Kovac in ER or adolescent fascination with war-torn countries, but I fantasized about the turn-of-the-century glamour of pre-WWI resorts on the Croatian coast, and the fringes of both the Ottoman and Roman empires, and the melting pot of Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim culture. I got a Croatian dictionary for Christmas once and tried my best to leverage my junior-high Russian into self-learning the Croatian language. I didn't grow out of loving Yugoslavia. I watched depressing subtitled films. My undergraduate thesis was on a late-20th century Slovenian war poet. In graduate school, I had to appeal to both my own department and the Slavic department to take a credit/non-credit spot in an undergraduate class where I finally got to stu...

Literally this entire post is spoilers. There.   There are many things that can cause disappointment in a horror movie. Cheesy acting. Gross-out cheap thrills. Bad special effects. But the one that always slays me (no pun intended) is when a movie is saying really interesting things and then falls completely apart in the last ten minutes, not because the monster looks disappointing to what you imagined (they often do), but because of a lack of thematic consistency. A good horror movie is always about the monsters that we experience in real life as much as those that lurk on screen; great horror movie finishes the job it started with some internal consistency. Here are three horror movies that really stuck the landing, in no particular order, chosen at more-or-less random from my Saturday morning nap. I could have found others, but these sprung to mind as having particularly satisfying endings: Night of the Living Dead Theme: The individual, no matter how competent, is no ma...