If you are deciding whether to go: yes. Go before they pack their trunks.

QUICK GUIDE

• Dates: Saturday, August 8–Sunday, September 13, 2026

• Cost: Free

• Location: Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Back Bay, between Fairfield and Dartmouth Streets

• Best starting point: The official site says the herd begins near The ’Quin House at 217 Commonwealth Avenue

• Tickets/reservations: None

• Can kids touch the elephants? Yes

• How long: Flexible. You can make it a relatively quick walk-through or let a child stop, touch, double back, choose favorites and generally negotiate with every elephant she meets.

• Crowd reality: The elephants are peaceful. The humans are the stampede.

• Shoes: Wear something you do not mind getting dusty.

THE DAY BEGAN WITH AN ELEPHANT DRESS AND A PARENTING COURSE CORRECTION

I had a vision. The Girl was going to see the elephants in her Pink Chicken elephant dress. This was on-brand thematic parenting: charming, coordinated, photographable, practically ordained.

My enthusiasm landed differently on her. She thought she might not be allowed to go if she refused to wear the dress. Somewhere between styling the outing and staging it, I had accidentally made my vision feel like the price of admission.

So I backed off. Let’s be clear: I still styled her. Dressing The Girl is one of my great joys, and that Molo llama/alpaca dress was no accident. I just built the look around what she would accept instead of insisting that the elephant dress was the ticket to the elephants. The final outfit, with Stride Rite pink lacy Mary Janes and pink socks, was infinitely better anyway.

That was enough of a course correction for one afternoon. We had elephants to meet.

“COME ON, FAMILY!!!”

Once we reached the herd, The Girl immediately appointed herself matriarch.

“Come on, family!!!” she called again and again, meaning faster, keep up. I think she borrowed the phrase from Gabby’s Dollhouse, PAW Patrol, or both and converted it into an operational command for her actual family.

HERD IMMUNITY. HEARD IMMUNITY.

A week later, after nine days at Seaside Cabin with her shows playing in the same room where I was trying to work, I finally heard how much of that afternoon she had been speaking fluent television. At home, I know the characters and songs but do not always hear the whole language system she is absorbing. At the cabin, there was nowhere else for the soundtrack to go.

That made “Come on, family!!!” funnier and more interesting to me. She was not simply parroting a catchphrase. She had taken borrowed language out into the wild and turned it into leadership, urgency, play and belonging.

Which is a lot to extract from a six-year-old yelling at her parents to move faster past a herd of wicker elephants, but here we are.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY FEELS LIKE TO VISIT

The photographs make the individual sculptures look impressive. In person, the accumulation is the point. One elephant is an object. A hundred elephants become a social world.

There are adults, calves, different stances and expressions, and enough individuality that children naturally begin treating them as someones rather than somethings. The Girl wanted to inspect them, touch them and assign preferences to them. My contemporaneous note beside the elephant named Matt reads: “What’s in his mouth? I want to pet him.” Later she announced of another elephant, “She loves petting on her ears.”

The official invitation to touch the sculptures matters. This is not art a child has to admire from a prescribed distance while an adult whispers, “Don’t touch.” You can walk among the herd, get close, circle back and establish favorites.

That freedom is a large part of why I would recommend the installation to families. The experience can expand or contract around the child you actually brought with you.

WHY THE ELEPHANTS ARE HERE

The sculptures were created by Indigenous artisans in India from Lantana camara, an invasive plant that damages wildlife habitat. Each sculpture is modeled on a real elephant. The larger project raises money and attention for human-wildlife coexistence: not preserving nature somewhere safely separate from human life, but learning how to share space.

Commonwealth Avenue Mall is a particularly good setting for that idea. The herd has entered ordinary Boston — brownstones, dogs, traffic, strollers, tourists, commuters, neighbors — rather than being sealed inside an event footprint.

For one afternoon, Back Bay practices coexistence in miniature. The elephants make room for us. We make room for them. Then the humans all try not to trample one another while taking pictures.

WHAT TO KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

Where exactly are the elephants?

The official Boston visit page places the herd on Commonwealth Avenue Mall between Fairfield and Dartmouth Streets, beginning near The ’Quin House at 217 Commonwealth Avenue. You do not need to enter through a gate; this is an open public installation and you can join the herd anywhere along the route.

Which direction should you walk?

The sculptures are staged as though they are migrating east. Starting near The ’Quin House lets you move with the herd rather than against it.

How long should you allow?

There is no timed entry and no required route. You can make it a quick pass or let the visit stretch. I would allow at least an hour with a child who wants to touch, revisit and choose favorites; more if you are building in photos, snacks or a Copley/BPL extension.

The more useful answer is: budget enough time for the child you have. If yours wants to touch every elephant, revisit favorites, conduct family-herding operations and possibly pursue unrelated urban wildlife, this is not a quick walk.

Can children touch the elephants?

Yes. Ride them? No. Touch them? Yes. The project itself invites visitors to touch the sculptures.

What are the crowds like?

We encountered plenty of people on Saturday afternoon, and photo bottlenecks formed around some elephants. Turlach had walked through the installation the evening before, Friday after 6 p.m., and it was noticeably less crowded. If crowd load matters for your family, timing appears to make a real difference.

The Mall is still the city: traffic, dogs, conversations and ordinary Back Bay noise continue around you. It is peaceful public art, not a controlled sensory environment.

Also: dust. The human stampede kicked up enough dirt that The Girl’s light-pink light-up sneakers and socks took a direct hit. Wear comfortable shoes you do not mind getting dirty.

What about strollers, wheelchairs and mobility?

The Mall has a central pedestrian path and plentiful benches, but step-free movement across the intersections is less straightforward than the long straight path suggests. At some crossings, the marked crosswalks and curb cuts pull you toward the sides instead of carrying you directly through the center.

If step-free travel matters to you, plan the crossings rather than assuming the most visually direct route continues seamlessly. I do not have the firsthand disability experience to tell you whether every curb transition is workable, so I am not going to overclaim here.

What should you bring?

• Water and weather-appropriate layers

• A charged phone or camera

• Comfortable shoes that can get dusty

• Whatever stroller or mobility support your child normally needs for a longer city outing

• Patience for repeat visits to the same elephant

MAKE AN AFTERNOON OF IT: COPLEY + THE BPL

The elephant installation works perfectly well as a stand-alone outing, but ours kept going.

After the herd, we ate outside near Copley. The adults had sandwiches from All’Antico Vinaio on Boylston, across from Trinity Church and Copley Square. The Girl looked around at the family she had successfully herded and announced, “Today is friendship day now!”

Then someone needed a bathroom, which is how any decent family itinerary is designed.

That sent us into the Boston Public Library. What began as a practical bathroom detour turned into a second attraction: the courtyard and fountain, the Bacchante and Infant Faun sculpture, the architecture, the murals and, eventually, the Sargent Gallery stairs. After climbing them, The Girl reported, “That was a looong hike.”

For purposes of this guide, the important information is simple: if your elephant outing needs bathrooms, air-conditioning, a place to regroup or an easy next destination, the BPL is a very useful extension.

WHY YOU SHOULD GO BEFORE THE HERD MOVES ON

The Great Elephant Migration is genuinely beautiful, but beauty is not the whole reason to go. Its power comes from being public, physical and temporary. It interrupts a familiar street and changes who appears to belong there. It invites children to touch the art. It gives strangers a shared reason to slow down, point, make room and look at the same thing.

The Girl began the day afraid that the wrong dress might cost her the outing. She ended it leading us through the herd and making sure nobody fell behind.

“Come on, family!!!”

The elephants remain on Commonwealth Avenue Mall through September 13. After Boston, the touring herd heads west to Livermore, California.

Hurry! Go meet them before these pachyderms pack their trunks.

USEFUL LINKS

Official Boston visit information — The Great Elephant Migration

Official project overview

This morning I woke up on Mount Desert Island, one year older with no functioning automobile, and absolutely nowhere I need to be.

And, guess what? That is not what I had planned, but as it turns out, the Universe is a far more competent event planner than I will ever be.

As of Saturday afternoon, there was to be a birthday dinner on Monday, sometime after 5 PM but definitely not as late as eight. I researched this. There were options. There is now an entire restaurant guide sitting ready and waiting for the next time I attempt to leave the house in the evening on purpose.

Instead, we may or may not be stranded in Vacationland.

This all began Saturday when Turlach and The Girl dropped me at the laundromat in Southwest Harbor while they raced to the dump before it closed — no Sunday hours — and filled our five-gallon jug with water for cleaning up the cabin in the morning.

DownEast Laundromat, Southwest Harbor.
Somewhere inside the spinning drum, there I am. 😵‍💫🧺🪞

On the ride to the farm store for Beech Hill Farm, a training ground for College of the Atlantic’s agricultural program, three gallons of the water spilled in the trunk and filled the cavity where the spare tire is hidden underneath the cargo floor. Turlach attempted to bail it out with an improvised traffic-cone device, and later the large empty Dunks cup he remembered he keeps as the driver’s-side trash bin.

Did I mention that I loooove a resourceful man? Your Honor, may I please approach the bench and submit Exhibit A: Turlach MacDonagh?

When we got home, my husband was airing out the car and it started to go splunky. That is the technical term. He took a video. The dashboard computer system went bonkers before it settled on kaput.

The windows were all open, so Turlach took the plastic tarp he had bought for laying over the furniture when closing the cabin and fashioned hillbilly car window dormers.

He disconnected the battery as recommended and decided to hope for the best in the morning. I texted friends, “I will let you know if I accidentally moved to Maine.”

And, “If I did, I hope you guys will visit me.”

One of my girlfriends immediately saw the entertainment potential and proposed a reality show: The Mainers. I think a husband-and-wife sitcom treatment would be more up our alley: My Maine Man. A no-budget guerrilla indie web series with Northern Exposure vibes and public-access prestige television ambitions. And given the BrickDonagh household black belt in bickering, we could always pivot to a murder mystery.

Except something else happened.

Turlach relaxed.

He really relaxed. This absurd pile-up of unlikely events somehow elbowed out enough space for surrender. Though I am tempted to submit a missing-persons report for my husband, the new guy is kinda cute. I think I’m gonna keep him. 😜

A little background for those who are new here: this trip began with Turlach frustrated that our late departure meant we were going to miss every possible dinner option. Even on a wild and crazy MDI Saturday night, most restaurants close by 7 PM or 8 PM sharp.

Plot twist with adequate tension foreshadowing the brief drive to Bernard: as he pulled out of the cabin driveway with just enough time to make it to Thurston’s before closing, he dared to say OUT LOUD, for the nosy Universe to casually overhear, that the trip up hadn’t been as bad as he thought it would be… duh-duh-dahhhhh!!!

As if on cue at dinner, after eating corn on the cob and while sucking the meat out of a lobster leg, the crown on his front tooth cracked right off.

This particular tooth has more stories than Aesop. At 17, while partnering a ballerina through one of those big spins whose technical name I absolutely do not know, her elbow did not get in fast enough. Root canal. Crown. Years later, while in Madrid visiting his sister, he fell face-first and cracked the same tooth. And now, present-day Maine: lobster fight.

After the shock wore off, he started taking lots of toothless selfies with a thumbs-up in the frame. He got in touch with the dentist’s office to evaluate the damage and formulate a plan. Thankfully, that plan did not include having to return home, waving to my parents across the median of Route 1 as they traveled north to visit us midweek.

He was scheduled to get a temporary crown today. Which just so happens to be when we will still be in Maine figuring out where to send the dead car and waiting for Pop Pop to make the six-hour drive back up north to retrieve us.

This week was WFC — Work from Cabin — so Turlach was moonlighting his vacation. He woke early to get online, work a full day and still sign off early enough to shuttle us around, and play both the part of the hair stylist and salon client on our daughter’s unrelaxing version of what I can only describe as Torture Spa.

The Girl kept busy WFC (Working from Cabin) on “special projects”. 😻🐾🏠✨

Wait, let me walk that back. He did take all of Wednesday off.

As did Pop Pop—the artist formerly known as Daddy—so that they could spend a leisurely afternoon bonding and replacing the rotted-out front steps with a stable structure. Which is where the family history starts seeping in…

“My dad’s Pa built Seaside Cabin!” The Girl has become a definitive narrator for her family stories. Her current favorite personal piece of information to share liberally with anyone who will listen is, “My dad is Turlach. He is a weirdo.”

Separately, in car ride conversations with just us girls, she has connected the dots that “You like weirdos.” Yes. Mommy does. You are correct, boo.

This particular weirdo does, however, have one reliably un-relaxed setting: departure.

The final hours before we leave anywhere involve me being terminally behind on packing, which somehow rips a hole in the space-time continuum and sends his stress level into another dimension.

But did you follow this tangent all the way to the beautiful part?

Through no machination of my own, the car cannot leave.

Therefore I cannot possibly be late leaving.

Do you understand what has happened here?

I have been granted immunity.

There is no departure time to miss. There is no increasingly agitated romantic lead querying whether I am almost ready. There is no need for me to explain that yes, technically I am still putting things into bags, but spiritually I have been packing for hours.

The Mazda has done what no organizational system has ever managed to accomplish for me:

It has removed the deadline.

So I am sitting here on the spectacularly uncomfortable red wicker couch that family lore says may have come from an actual fire sale — or salvage — after the island burned long ago. Turlach’s Pa was part of the citizen fire brigades.

The lack of creature comforts gets a pass. It is close to physiologically impossible to be pissed off or stressed out when this is the view.

The Girl came over while her dad was working and asked for his phone. He handed it over so he could get back to work. Later, he found this perfectly composed bit of “Wow” taken from the bay window.🪟🍎⬇️🌳

I’d been nursing an upset stomach all day, which did not make it onto my original vacation Pinterest vision board.

And yet, here I sit: completely relaxed. I can browse the internet and play Shopping Cart on ThredUp to my heart’s content.

My husband is relaxed.

My daughter is less enchanted by our accidental extension. Stick a fork in her: The Girl is D-O-N-E, done.

She has been a trooper about not living inside her homesickness this trip. She has gone swimming and made up games and started the first pass of the screenplay for her debut film as writer-director-producer-star, Beach of Doom, and watched Paw Patrol and “driven” the last stretch of dirt road across Teti land to Seaside Cabin from Turlach’s lap, assuring us:

“Reeeelaxxx. I know what I am doing here.”

The Girl and Gussy Goo, keeping watch over Bass Harbor. 🐈‍⬛🧒🏼👀

But when she realized the broken car might mean we were not going home when we were supposed to, she lost it and was inconsolable for a stretch.

She wants her house. She wants all of her toys. She wants the approximately seven playgrounds within reasonable walking distance of our front door and more noodle joints than you can shake a stick at — possibly more noodle joints than exist in the entire state of Maine.

And playdates. She definitely wants the playdates. She is past ready.

She has also been problem solving. Her first proposal was that we buy a new car so we can drive home. When they fix our “old” car, they can send it to us. Also, Pop Pop could drive up here and tow us with his van.

And if they do tow the red car, she wants to go with it “because she wants to see how they fix it.”

That is less Whee, field trip! than If this thing is standing between me and my toys, I would like to personally supervise the repair.

Unfortunately, Turlach tried the car Sunday morning and it did not magically start.

So the current birthday plan is that he will call the Mazda dealerships in Waterville and Bangor this morning and decide which one we will be towed to.

Waterville is 105 miles away. AAA gives us 100. Of course it does.

So Turlach upgraded our membership. Five miles. We have apparently reached the stage of vacation where we are upgrading roadside assistance in order to get home.

There is also the small matter of physically getting the Mazda out of here. The parking brake is locked because the car has no power, so we will probably need a flatbed. The car is sitting at the end of an approximately 800-foot-long, narrow, winding dirt driveway.

At first, this raised the obvious question of how on earth a flatbed tow truck was going to get down here. Then Turlach pointed out that if the electric bucket truck can get down here, the tow truck probably can too.

This is not theoretical. The road had to be widened so the electric bucket truck could get down to the cabin before we were able to return post-COVID in 2024. So the infrastructure work that helped make Seaside Cabin habitable again may now be what saves our red car.

There is still, however, the electrical wire that crosses over the driveway. Challenge for AAA personnel: retrieve automobile without also disconnecting cabin power.

Meanwhile, The Girl goes back and forth between watching Paw Patrol and turning the bathroom into a construction site. The stand-up shower stall is a wrecking ball. Her father said the bathroom was a boat. Clearly he does not know what he is talking about.

Duh. The Girl knows what she is doing.

My birthday Boston-adjacent family-friendly restaurant guide is sitting there waiting patiently for the next time I decide to attempt nightlife. With school starting on Thursday, it may be a bit before that summits the priority list. My butt is planted on the best uncomfortable wicker couch in the whole-wide-world, writing, online shopping, and enjoying the fact that for once there is an ironclad external reason that I am not ready to leave.

And here is the best part: our bags are mostly packed.

I spent Saturday afternoon folding and putting away laundry and decided to just pack then and give us one less thing to argue about in the morning. At the very least, I thought, there won’t be a Cadillac-sized mountain of unpacked evidence sitting there in plain sight.

One of many, many iterations of The Original Plan™️ was that if we got ourselves out early enough, we could squeeze in one last trip to Echo Lake — or leave early and visit Laura in Waldoboro on the drive home.

For once, I was ahead of the departure. Vacation-calibrated nervous systems, it turns out, are much better at pulling that off.

The Girl: desperately ready to go home. The husband: M.I.A. and replaced by a suspiciously relaxed Maine main man. The red Mazda: waiting for a flatbed at the bottom of a dirt road with an electrical wire hanging between it and the road.

And somehow, despite the false starts and wrong turns and work-from-cabin and homesickness and crown-versus-lobster and the upset stomach, this has been a really good vacation for me. Relaxing, even. I am not mad that the Universe extended this series for another day.

There is one non-snarky thing I should probably say about my marriage before I ruin the moment by making another joke: Had I picked anyone else to build a ridiculous life with, this could have been one long bad Yelp review instead of a cheeky account of catastrophe after calamity.

10 out of 10 — would marry again.

Worst-case scenario: I have accidentally moved to Maine. We’ll know soon enough, but I hate to sign off with the heroine’s fate still hanging in the balance, so let’s pretend it’s official with a jaunty tombstone draft:

Here lies Kara.
She finally packed on time.
Nobody was mad at her. Yet.

There was absolutely nowhere to go.
I guess she lives here now.

🧳⏰🦞🌊🌅⛵️⚓️⚰️🪦

P.S. — SPOILER ALERT: The Mazda is off to Bangor.

And away she goes.

And yes, “prat” is the British word for a foolish or ridiculous person. Sometimes the headline writes itself.

According to Page Six, Spencer Pratt responded to Jimmy Kimmel and Molly McNearney talking about how they began dating while Kimmel was her boss by asking: “Isn’t this what Harvey Weinstein did?”

No. No, it is not, Sir.

What makes McNearney’s account interesting is that she does talk about the power imbalance. As she put it when Kimmel acknowledged he hadn’t thought about it the same way: “The person in power usually doesn’t.”

And that, folks, is the conversation.

A relationship involving unequal workplace power can be complicated, questionable, or even unethical without being equivalent to coercion, assault, or serial sexual predation.

There was a legitimate conversation sitting right there about power and consent.

Spencer Pratt somehow pole-vaulted over it directly into Harvey Weinstein.

What a prat.

Have you heard? The AI B0rg Collective lurched beyond all of our supposedly sovereign borders while we were sleeping, ominous dissonant droning scoring its arrival.

Unfortunately, nobody appears to have sent the diplomatic envoy with heads of state to the water’s edge to greet it. I hear Picard and Riker are temporarily indisposed in the head with a copy of War and Peace, so we may be on our own.

We are late to the reception, not early to the invasion.

So, now that the cube has breached the perimeter, how do we prepare to meet this newfangled collective beast?

Do we put the coffee on? Latte, cortado, or Americano? Whole milk or oat? Sugar? How, exactly, does the Collective take its cup of joe?

This is more or less the question rattling around my head while my husband binge-rewatches Star Trek: The Next Generation for the unknowable-teenth time and I use artificial intelligence to organize, retrieve, test, draft, argue with, and occasionally horrify myself.

I am not standing on a hill shouting that the machines are coming. I am in the whale’s belly, studying the digestive tract. And I am painfully aware that none of this is neutral.

AI is already rearranging labor, authorship, education, disability accommodation, search, publishing, energy demand, privacy, creativity, expertise, and the ordinary experience of thinking with a machine nearby. Some of those changes are extraordinary. Some are dangerous. Most are both more complicated and more mundane than the loudest people on either side would have us believe.

But let’s get real here for a moment, dear internet friend: my abstaining will not stop any of the negative consequences marching our collective way. It will only leave me less prepared to understand and brace for what is coming.

I would rather be on the away team

One cautious response to technology is to treat nonparticipation as moral cleanliness: do not use the thing and therefore do not become implicated in the thing.

I understand the instinct. I do not think it gets us very far.

It is best not to try to install meaningful guardrails around a system until you know its topography like the back of your hand. You cannot translate its risks for ordinary people if your knowledge begins and ends with someone else’s warning label. You cannot participate intelligently in policy debates about form and function if you have refused to look closely at either.

And there are real opportunities for the people who learn early. Personal ones, certainly. Economic ones. Creative ones. But also civic ones: the opportunity to translate a strange and fast-moving technology into digestible warnings; to identify where guardrails actually belong; to ask what regulation can realistically do; to distinguish a moral panic from a genuine threat; and to notice harms that become obvious only when you have lived alongside the tool long enough to see where it quietly changes your behavior.

I, for one, do not want the only people on the away team to be the people selling tickets for the ship.

Federation questions

Maybe this is why I have been hearing the whispers of Star Trek’s imaginary, utopian-adjacent structures through whatever piece of Borg hardware is apparently lodged behind my ear.

The Federation is not compelling because it discovered a way to avoid the unknown. Its organizing premise is the opposite: the unknown is out there, sentient beings are going to encounter one another, technology will keep expanding what is possible, and somebody has to build structures for navigating the consequences.

Exploration needs rules. Contact creates obligations. Capability is not the same thing as permission.

That is where I keep landing with AI.

What does this cost? How do we split the bill? What positive effect can it have? How do we share that wealth? Who gets the productivity dividend? Who loses work, status, bargaining power, privacy, authorship, water, energy, habitat, or attention along the way? Who decides what counts as an acceptable trade?

Those are human-rights questions. They are labor questions. They are disability questions. They are environmental questions. They are copyright questions. They are democratic-governance questions.

And then there are the migrating birds.

Who is the guardian ad litem for the migrating birds?

A migrating bird does not get to attend a zoning hearing. It cannot negotiate the placement of a data center. It cannot object to changes in water use, heat, habitat, light, noise, or the infrastructure built along its route.

It can still absorb the cost. The bird still gets the bill. It just has no mechanism for disputing it or deferring payment.

That is the problem with pretending that the stakeholders are merely the people sitting around the table. Some parties cannot appear. Some cannot consent. Some cannot vote. Some cannot bargain. Some will not even be born until long after the contract is signed.

So who represents them?

I keep reaching for the legal idea of a guardian ad litem: someone appointed to protect the interests of a minor or other person who cannot adequately represent themselves in a proceeding. I do not mean that we literally need to subpoena a chickadee. I mean that our systems need an equivalent mechanism for the interests that otherwise vanish from the accounting.

Children. Future generations. Nonhuman animals. Ecosystems. Communities far from the places where the benefits are captured. People whose work trained a system without giving them a meaningful seat at the table. People whose lives become legible as data before they become legible as stakeholders.

If the benefits are divided among the people in the room while the costs are assigned to parties with no mechanism for disputing them, the accounting is fraudulent before we ever get to the bottom line.

The coffee is not surrender

This is where I want to be very clear about the coffee: putting on a pot for the B0rg is not surrender.

It is not techno-optimism. It is not an agreement to assimilate.

It is belated first contact.

It is getting close enough to find out what the thing actually does. Where it is astonishing. Where it lies. Where it flatters. Where it erases provenance. Where it saves labor. Where it consumes labor invisibly. Where it opens doors for people whose bodies or brains have made conventional systems expensive to navigate. Where convenience turns into dependency. Where assistance becomes infrastructure.

For me, some of the benefits are already impossible to dismiss. AI can reduce the executive-function cost of handling an enormous amount of information. It can make a sprawling archive searchable. It can help me catch a thought before it disappears, test the architecture of an argument, and externalize work that otherwise has to be held in my head.

That is real value.

Real value does not absolve us of asking who paid for it.

That may be the central moral mistake available to us right now: treating benefit as proof of innocence or harm as proof of uselessness. We need to be capable of holding both.

There is no neutral zone

I would love a neutral zone. A little patch of space where those of us who are uneasy could hang back until the lawyers, engineers, ethicists, governments, corporations, artists, teachers, parents, climate scientists, and billionaires finish sorting everything out.

I hate to break it to you (and to myself too FWIW) but that zone simply does not exist.

The technology is being developed whether I open the app or not. Companies are deploying it whether I approve or not. Schools, workplaces, governments, doctors, publishers, scammers, artists, disabled people, teenagers, militaries, and marketers are all going to make decisions about it on wildly different timelines.

Nonparticipation may be a personal boundary. It is not a global containment strategy.

I want to know the form and function of the beast well enough to explain where and how sharp its teeth are. I want to know where its weak spots are (its Achilles’ heel, if you will). I want to know what it can genuinely give us before somebody uses those gifts to excuse what it takes. I want the people arguing about guardrails to include people who have actually hit the rail. I want human rights in the first paragraph and the migrating birds somewhere in the room, represented by counsel if necessary.

And I want us to keep asking the impolite questions.

What does this cost? Who pays? Who benefits? Who gets a say? Who cannot possibly speak for themselves? Who speaks for them? What positive effect can it have? How do we share that wealth?

The cube has breached the perimeter. The ominous dissonant droning is already in the soundtrack.

Fine. Put the coffee on.

But before we pour it, somebody had better review the bill.

AND THEY’RE OFF!

TOMMY BAHAMA gets a clean break from the gate! Natural straw, youth sizing—she’s polished, she’s classic, she’s moving beautifully—

TOMMY BAHAMA enters the field.

But OLD NAVY SCALLOPED is coming up fast on the outside!
Cream! Wide brim! Bow at the crown! Look at those scallops!
“The Old Navy is cuter!”

OLD NAVY SCALLOPED makes her move.
And that’s all the owner needs to see! OLD NAVY surges ahead!

But WAIT—

J.CREW CREWCUTS IS MAKING A MOVE!
Five dollars, ladies and gentlemen. FIVE DOLLARS.
The shipping costs more than the horse. CREWCUTS doesn’t care! She’s charging down the stretch on pure bargain energy!

AND HERE COMES HANNA ANDERSSON TWEEN!
She’s wide! She’s woven! She’s giving Riviera!

HANNA ANDERSSON: Riviera energy, under review by the stewards.
But questions surround this late entry—is she too big? Is this a future-season prospect?
WE HAVE A MEASUREMENT FROM THE PADDOCK—
TWENTY-ONE AND A HALF INCHES!
THE CROWD ERUPTS!

The owner throws down an offer! THE OFFER IS ACCEPTED!
HANNA ANDERSSON HAS CLEARED THE STEWARDS’ INQUIRY AND ENTERED THE FIELD!
Word from the owner’s box: Hanna Andersson has emerged as the favorite hopeful.

Meanwhile HAUTE HIPPIE remains a mystery horse. Beautiful lines. Strong brim. Excellent breeding. REFUSES TO DISCLOSE HER MEASUREMENTS.
Officials are standing by. And all of them are racing against the most dangerous competitor on the track:

THE VACATION DEPARTURE DATE.
Saturday for Maine. Or Friday night, if the buyer’s husband decides to be a crazy person. The owner is now working the paddock, sending the same plea to every stable:

“Thank you so much!!! Is there any way you can ship today? We are leaving for Maine on Saturday (or Friday if my husband decides to be a crazy person lol) and i would love to have it by then for my daughter. No worries if the timing doesn’t work. I know it’s tight :)”

BREAKING FROM THE PADDOCK—
HAUTE HIPPIE HAS FINALLY SUBMITTED TO MEASUREMENT.
TWENTY-TWO AND A HALF INCHES.

Paddock report: the mystery horse finally submits to measurement. Usernames and account details redacted for publication.

The mystery horse has finally been measured. Officials confer. The owner looks at the already crowded field racing toward a vestibule in Greater Boston.

HAUTE HIPPIE IS SCRATCHED.

They’re coming into the final turn—

• TOMMY BAHAMA IS IN THE FIELD—

• OLD NAVY IS IN THE FIELD—

• CREWCUTS IS RUNNING ON FIVE DOLLARS AND A DREAM—

• HANNA ANDERSSON HAS CLEARED THE STEWARDS’ INQUIRY—

AND HERE THEY COME TO THE WIRE!

AND THEY’RE THUNDERING HOME—OLD NAAAAAVY! TOMMY BAHAAAAAAMA! CREWCUTS STILL RUNNING ON FIVE DOLLARS AND A DREAM! AND HAAAAAAAAANNA ANDERSSON COMING HARD FROM THE OUTSIDE—

IT’S HAAAAAAAAAAAAATS TO THE WIIIIIIIIIIIIRE!

THE CURRENT FIELD:

• 🥇 OLD NAVY SCALLOPED - Leading in Oh Come On, That’s Really Cute.

• 🥈 TOMMY BAHAMA - Natural straw and yellow ribbon. Doesn’t need gimmick - legitimately cute in her own right.

• 🥉 J.CREW CREWCUTS – The bargain long shot. The shipping cost more than the horse.

• HANNA ANDERSSON -Twenty-one and a half inches. Riviera energy. The owner’s favorite hopeful, a late entry who cleared the stewards’ inquiry and is demanding a podium recount.

• HAUTE HIPPIE — SCRATCHED - Twenty-two and a half inches. Elegant. Mysterious. Finally measured. Officials ruled the field sufficiently crowded.

There was supposed to be one hat. Somehow the search became a full field.

May the best hat make it to Maine.

🏇 👒 🏇 👒 🏇

Why is Patrick Dempsey selling AI classes?

For the record, I know that this is not actually Patrick Dempsey. It is simply a man who occupies the extremely specific demographic of Patrick Dempsey, but make him Harvard Data Science - a casting choice perfectly calibrated to this particular moment in the AI zeitgeist.

Still, the casting is almost too perfect. The ad promises that most leaders can strategize or build, but almost no one can do both.

Sir, you performed impossible brain surgery and then built a deck on Meredith’s land. We know you can do both.

Apparently Dr. Derek Shepherd has left neurosurgery to teach prompt engineering. Honestly, it may be the most plausible career pivot I’ve seen advertised on Facebook all week.

Welcome to the 2026 Summer Bummer Olympics!

We begin, as tradition dictates, with the Parade of RumiNations.

One after another, the delegations march past, waving their flags in matching Ralph Lauren tracksuits. Bespoke for the Games or liquidated TJ Maxx merch? Neither retailer has confirmed the provenance of the tracksuits, and representatives for Ralph Lauren and TJ Maxx did not respond to requests for confirmation before airtime.

Miscarriage. Infertility. Brain surgery. Cushing’s disease. The dog dying. Bodies flailing. Memory failing.

Kara has apparently been writing again. That is certainly good news for the proliferation of bad news, sports fans!

And with that, the Opening Ceremony has come to a close. Let the Games begin!

Up first: the grief slalom.

She’s coming into the anniversary gates now. She’s known this section of the course has been coming all year—

Oh! Tears in Heaven over the supermarket sound system. She did not see that gate coming. Can she hold her line through Produce?

She’s fighting to recover—

Oh, that was a close call! She held on through self-checkout and made it safely to the privacy and comfort of her car.

I would like to be very clear: when I started this stack, I did not set out to steal Wednesday Addams’s vibe.

But, I guess years of being a writer who didn’t write, when the floodgates opened…

WOOSH!!! the backed up stuff comes out first. One piece opens a door to another, which reveals a hallway I apparently haven’t inspected in twenty years.

And there, waiting patiently behind every door:

another fcuking bummer.

At some point I looked at the growing pile of published posts and working drafts and thought, sweet mother of all that is melancholy… somebody get this girl a cocktail and a snack.

So much oy, but where is the joy?

The joy is very much there but the lighter fare has a lousy paper trail.

Pain generates documentation. Illness produces charts and lab results and appointment summaries and patient portals. Infertility produces binders. Miscarriage produces dates you remember even when you would prefer not to. The surgeon’s knife cuts life neatly into before and after. The hard stuff keeps asking you to reconstruct the timeline. What happened? When did it happen? What happened next? What did I know then? What do I understand now?

Joy is much less administratively demanding. Nobody hands you discharge instructions after an excellent afternoon. There is no patient portal documenting the time you laughed so hard you couldn’t breathe. Nobody orders follow-up imaging to determine whether a friendship remains delightful.

You don’t generally save evidence proving that Tuesday was perfectly ordinary.

So when you start excavating a life by following the things that still seem to require explanation, you can create a remarkably convincing record of a life composed almost entirely of calamity.

Mine wasn’t.

Yes - there were terrible things.

There were also dogs and weddings and friends and ridiculous nicknames and places we kept returning to. There were projects that worked and stupid inside jokes. There were tiny obsessions and enormous plans. There was falling in love. There was becoming a mother. There are currently an unreasonable number of fake fingernails in my house.

All of this is also evidence.

I don’t want to manufacture balance by following every sad story with a happy one. I don’t want to slap a smile emoji over the hard parts or pretend the things that hurt didn’t occupy enormous amounts of space when they were happening.

I just don’t want the things that demanded the most explanation to become, by default, the things that get to tell the whole story.

Because they don’t.

There were days that weren’t turning points. Things that delighted me without teaching me anything. Jokes that don’t become metaphors. Places I loved before I understood why.

Ordinary evidence of a life being lived rather than survived. Healing isn’t the part where the bummers stop being true, it’s the point when they stop being the only things that seem important enough to write down.

The Bummer Olympics aren’t canceled. I’ve trained extensively and am in serious contention to medal.

But I think it’s time to add some exhibition events. Breakdancing anyone?

We celebrate transformations as though they happen in two photographs. Before. After. Almost nobody photographs The During. The blood on the wall because you reached for the light switch before you understood the wound. The room doesn’t look heroic: it’s... interrupted.

The During is not montage; it’s triage. 🩸

Who is posting the towels on the floor? The half-used bandages? The sink you haven’t wiped down because you’re still trying to decide whether you’re badly hurt or just badly shaken?

There is an unspoken resistance to photographing the unphotogenic, and let’s face it: The During has bad teeth. It’s still wearing yesterday’s hospital bracelet. You don’t reach for the camera because you’re still fumbling in the dark to turn on the lights.

You text a friend awkwardly with your other hand: Is this normal?

And the hours spent wondering whether you’re healing or simply learning to live with pain? Hard to say. “Dr. Google will see you now” as you fire up your browser at 2:17 AM. Unfinished is easy to mistake for failing before you give it a beat, take a breath, and eat a snack.

To All the Messy Rooms I’ve Loved Before

On my phone camera roll lives a collection of messy-room pics. In my faves, the defeat is palpable: destruction is the punchline, and I’ll be damned if they aren’t universally HIL-A-RIOUS. “Oh, you think you had a morning? LOL.” Your best move is to document the carnage for posterity, send it to a bestie, shrug, and just go about your day.

The carefully cropped and thoughtfully lit After shot isn’t a permanent state of being. The feng rarely stays shui-ed all day anyway. Messes are made in rooms absorbing illness and grief and parenthood and work and fatigue and ambition and laughter and too much stuff and not enough space and decisions deferred because there were more consequential decisions demanding whatever executive function was not available that day.

The messes get cleared eventually. Some of those rooms changed. Some are changing. Some will probably be messy again by the time I publish this draft. If I’m being completely honest, the After picture doesn’t bring the comfort it used to. It just makes me feel... late.

Late. Still blissfully here. In the present, choosing to be present while the stitches itch and the bruises change color before they disappear. Where progress is invisible from where you landed on the floor. Shed the need to look like the hero. You’re just another jerk doing what it takes to make it to the after party.

Maybe that’s the picture we’ve needed all along. Not because becoming is beautiful, but because that picture is evidence that, against all odds, you have arrived.

Four years ago today, a neurosurgeon threaded instruments through my nose and into the front center of my head to remove a pituitary tumor. In my mind, it was “brain surgery lite”—no gruesome cracked skull, just a little “up the nose with a rubber hose” action. No biggie, right?

People often remember surgeries by the hospital. But this story, not one to follow tropes, starts the Friday before.

A heat wave had settled over Greater Boston, the kind where you migrate from one air-conditioned building to another because existing outdoors feels like work. After biding my time while the girl attended her Early Intervention playgroup the next town over, I drove from errand to errand, with Rally riding in the roomy cargo area of our Mazda CX-5. Poor Rally girl was a heat magnet, with her thick Lab coat (black fur, not white cotton) and eighty pounds of enthusiastic street-pizza grazing weighing on her hips.

We picked up takeout before driving the hour-plus to the suburbs through summer Cape traffic. Mom and I were slated to tackle the upstairs room my parents want to convert into a laundry room and extension of their closet space.

Brain surgery was scheduled for the following week. It was going to be a while before I could help again. I remember looking around that half-finished room with the peculiar awareness that settles over you before something big. Not dread. Not fear exactly. Just the quiet recognition that life was about to divide itself into before and after, even as I didn’t know what “after” entailed.

Rally came on the trek because she always did. She was part of the rhythm of family life—errands, holidays, road trips, and ordinary Saturdays—with the same quiet attention she had once brought to her work as my mother-in-law Sandy’s mobility service dog. We were looking forward to her first trip to the cabin in Maine, once pandemic conditions and brain-surgery recovery permitted. I couldn’t wait for her to discover salt marshes, tide pools, and every irresistible low-tide stench the shoreline had to offer.

Instead, that afternoon, my father watched her collapse in the backyard while living her best life: happily galloping with the other two doggos. The heat had just broken, and the pack tore outside to celebrate. At first, he thought she was doing one of her dramatic drop-and-rolls to marinate in something especially foul. Our best guess, from his description, is that she was gone before she hit the ground.

Dad came upstairs to get me, but I couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell me. I followed him outside into the rain and threw my body over hers on the wet ground, wailing, while my parents worried about me lying there getting soaked. That must have been a sight.

Then there were the logistics, because there are always logistics. I had to call Turlach at work. I had our only car, so Dad drove to pick him up. Turlach called the vet, who referred us to a dog mortician. The mortician arrived in my parents’ driveway before Dad and Turlach did and waited patiently so Turlach could say goodbye. He was compassionate and lovely. We had Rally cremated; her remains are now tucked out of sight on the bottom living-room bookshelf beside Sandy’s. We collected ourselves and drove home. Our resident haus panther, Gus, was clearly confused. Where was Rally girl?

The experience was beyond surreal. One moment I was preparing for brain surgery. The next we were grieving the faithful companion slotted to hog the bed during my impending convalescence.

There wasn’t time to grieve properly. Brain surgery has a way of charging through with main character energy. There were bags to pack, instructions to follow, arrival times to remember, consent forms to sign, and a growing stack of practical details demanding attention. Every task was absurd—insult, meet injury: How was I supposed to remember to pack lip balm when my dog had simply . . . disappeared?

Grief took a number and sat down in the waiting room beside my husband and all the precious milestones Cushing’s disease had stolen from me during its lunch break. It would have to wait until the neurosurgeons were done with me.

Looking back now, I wonder whether that week planted one of the central questions of this entire project. Sometimes life doesn’t hand us one story at a time. Sometimes it shouts them all at once, a cacophony overstimulating our nervous systems to the point of collapse so that we have no choice but to start from scratch and rebuild. We stumble forward—gotta keep the momentum going—tripping over our own broken hearts.

Maybe that’s where the real story begins.

My recollection of the days in between is murky at best. I don’t recall packing. The mundane details I usually center are absent. I don’t remember the night before surgery, or what we told my daughter. I know she went to my parents’ house to run around with her cousin. I don’t think she even slept there that night—Turlach needed his emotional-support toddler—but I may be recollecting that wrong.

Even the hospital came with a strange historical loop. I was having the tumor removed by a team within a pituitary program that traces its lineage to the surgeon for whom my disease was named. I don’t know enough about the man to be truly upset with him, much less cast him as the villain in a pervasive global system. But I do like to point out Satan’s work of the patriarchy before it disappears into the wallpaper: medicine has a long habit of naming diseases for the men who described them, rather than for what happens to the people who live with them. Still, there it was. I had arrived in the institutional lineage of the man whose name my disease had made me carry.

The hospital returns in fragments. I think Turlach and I took selfies. I will have to find them and see what they remember for me. With my thin, rolling, uncooperative veins, the IV is always the worst part. I vaguely recall the person placing it being unnecessarily unkind about the difficulty, but even that memory will not hold still long enough for me to trust every edge of it.

I remember being wheeled toward surgery and watching the ceiling pass above me. Once they give you the good stuff, everything gets hazy.

I woke in the ICU. The IV in my hand hurt worse than the brain surgery. The pain kept increasing over the next few days. By the time someone finally listened, my protest had dwindled to a pathetic whimper. They called for the ultrasound cart and replaced the line.

The test results were good. Cortisol governed what came next. The adjustment was nasty. Survival logistics reigned supreme; grief was excused from the table.

At home, I was either asleep or projectile-vomiting through what felt like deep cortisol withdrawal. The Zofran that kept me from puking also rendered me unconscious. If there was supposed to be one clean moment when Rally’s absence became undeniable, it didn’t come. The goalpost moved. My body was too busy surviving to process its emergencies in or out of order.

My real Blue Santorini Extra Short Square manicure with a Blue Dots Extra Short Square accent nail (left) and the Doonails AI preview (right). The cobalt is remarkably close; the accent was my own combination.

Please forgive me while I geek out here. I used to do a lot of alpha and beta testing for startups. I kind of can’t help myself. 🤪

My current—possibly unhealthy—obsession is Doonails: reusable soft-gel press-on nails. I attach mine with adhesive tabs. No nail glue. No curing lamp. (FWIW, also no judgment if you do you with glue—or a curing lamp, too.)

Best part: no appointment. No sitting across from a stranger while both of us pretend not to notice that I have once again mangled my cuticles.

I realize that “reusable soft-gel press-on nails” is not an obvious gateway to a sprawling content project. And yet, here we are.

The self-care problem

I like having my nails done. I just never really had a person for nails—the reliable provider you trust enough to make the whole thing personal versus just another transaction. I am a big believer in having “a person”, and have personally followed my hairstylist across—and occasionally beyond—the state for close to 20 years.

For a while, my occasional indulgence was a favorite bougie neighborhood nail salon. White surfaces, clean edges, no clutter—just perfectly lined-up colorful bottles of polish arranged tonally in a cohesive, calming presentation. A gel manicure and regular pedicure, including the tip, run just north of $100 around here, so this was never part of my normal maintenance budget. My mom had given me a gift certificate, and I was looking forward to using it for a rare treat.

Then I missed the appointment.

It was part online-booking confusion—I had entered the wrong date and time—and part actual family emergency: I ended up having to take my daughter to the emergency room. In the middle of that, I forgot to untangle the appointment issue before the cancellation window closed.

The salon charged my card for the missed service.

I understood the policy. I also understood that I had now paid more than $100 for a manicure and pedicure I did not receive. Adding insult to injury, I still had the original gift certificate, which meant I had to go back one last time if I wanted to use the money my mom had already spent.

I also tried two other salons with a good friend who liked both places enough to return while remaining open to trying somewhere new. For me, those excursions were about spending time with a fellow member of my mom coven. A good mani-pedi experience was a welcome bonus, but it wasn’t make-or-break for the afternoon.

At one appointment, the nail tech commented on the amount of dead skin on my feet and suggested that I come in more often to address it. Fair play—he looks at feet all day. I didn’t disagree. But as he directed where and how I should place my feet and hands with curt, firm taps and tiny grunts—the nail-salon equivalent of an inconsiderate ballroom lead—I knew we weren’t a stylistic match. No shade; we all have our ways. The directive approach just wasn’t my vibe.

So there was my very minor but very real self-care problem. I wanted pretty hands and feet. Salon visits were expensive, logistically fragile and not reliably relaxing. Painting my own nails had never worked especially well for me. My nails are brittle, my nail beds are short, and regular polish seems able to detect the precise moment I begin to believe it might survive.

Then I found Doonails. Or rather, the algorithm tipped them off, and they hunted me across the internet until I relented and made that first purchase.

A small luxury that fits inside real life

Doonails did not transform me into someone who has hours of uninterrupted leisure or a standing beauty appointment. They gave me a version of nail care that can bend around the life I actually have.

I can apply them at home, at night, after the urgent things are done—or first thing in the morning, in that sweet little window between getting my daughter off to school and starting work. I can stop and deal with a kid issue. I can choose a dramatic color without committing to it for three weeks. I can remove them without grinding another layer off already-fragile nails. And once I learned the technique, I could get a polished result that made me feel noticeably more put together.

That last part sounds superficial until you have spent a stretch of life treating your own care as the first thing that can always be postponed. A small, visible thing that is only for you is not nothing.

Of course, I did not simply find one set I liked and move on with my life.

I started comparing shapes. Then lengths. Then colors against my skin tone. Then adhesive-tab sizes, prep methods, application order, wear time, removal, storage and reuse. I started recording what held up through laundry, swimming, exercise, cleaning, lifting and the kind of chores that require actual finger dexterity. I noted what was flattering, what was fun, what was easy to clean and what looked lovely online but washed me out in person.

There is now a spreadsheet.

There is also a guide.

Because apparently my idea of enjoying a consumer product is to conduct an unpaid longitudinal study of it.

The other experiment hiding inside the nail experiment

The guide is also my test case for a larger question: Can I use AI to help me structure ambitious content projects without allowing AI to flatten my voice, invent authority I do not have or quietly lose the good material along the way?

I am not a nail technician. I am not pretending to be one. Fast-forward through a couple dozen logged manicures, pedicures and combinations, and I remain a busy mom with brittle nails and extremely specific opinions earned through trial, error and occasional profanity.

That makes this a useful pilot project. The subject is low-stakes enough to play with, but the underlying content problem is real. I have product notes, photos, wear logs, half-finished observations, Facebook group posts, instructions, corrections and ideas scattered across formats and conversations. I want to see whether AI can help me turn that pile into something coherent and genuinely useful—the unofficial user guide I wish I had when I started—while preserving the funny asides, the reversals, the “actually, I changed my mind” moments and all of the unglamorous details that make it mine.

So far, I am using AI less like an oracle and more like a very patient editorial operations partner. It helps me sort and cross-reference notes, spot contradictions, build trackers, maintain a parking lot for future ideas and test different structures. I still make the judgments. I still correct it. Frequently. The experiment is partly about discovering what it does well—and partly about designing safeguards for the moments when it confidently does not.

That is why the latest feature on the Doonails website delighted two separate parts of my brain at once.

Doonails added an AI playground

Some really cool features appeared on the Doonails website last night, built around an AI tool that can render different sets on a photo of your own hand.

The try-on link appears on individual product pages and opens a menu that lets you filter the current catalog by length, shape and color.

Apologies in advance to anyone else who is as vulnerable as I am to a shiny new feature. Consider your evening spoken for.

You can virtually try on styles from the shop, filter them by length, shape and color, and get an estimated size guide for each finger. The tool also offers personalized tips for maximum wear.

The tool also estimates a press-on size for each finger and offers personalized wear tips.

Then there is the feature most likely to consume an unreasonable amount of time: you can describe a nail design that does not exist in the shop, choose a shape and length, and ask the AI to paint your imaginary set onto your hand

To be clear, those custom creations are previews, not products you can order. Which is probably wise. I do not need both an AI design studio and an Add to Cart button operating in the same browser window.

The custom-design tool is also interesting from the other side of the screen. Users are effectively showing Doonails which colors, finishes, shapes and combinations they want badly enough to invent. I have no idea whether the company plans to use that information for product development, but the feature could become a remarkably efficient source of customer-demand data.

The custom-design process and a few of the entirely imaginary sets I made with it. These are AI previews, not products currently sold by Doonails.

Naturally, I wanted to know how accurate the virtual try-on feature was. I tried styles in the tool and compared the renderings with my own photos of the actual sets on my actual hand.

Strawberry Stripes Extra Short Square in real life (left) and in the AI preview (right): a particularly close match in color, pattern, shape and length.

Blossom Babe Short Round in the AI preview (left) and during actual wear (right). The design translates well, but the real short-round shape reads longer and more tapered.

It is not perfect. Some combinations of shape, length and color render more faithfully than others. But for an initial rollout, it is really good—good enough to give a shopper a much better first impression than a product photo on someone else’s hand.

The catalog try-on absolutely would have saved me from a few bad color matches. It also would have converted me on styles I never would have put in my cart otherwise, so I suppose that is a wash rather than a savings. The house always wins.

The especially interesting part is that I now have something better than a vague opinion about the feature. Because I already photograph and track my sets, I can compare the virtual version with the real result. Where does the color shift? Does “short” look like the actual short length? Does an almond shape become too pointy? Does the model preserve the relationship between nail width, nail bed and finger shape?

I imagine those real-world comparisons—and feedback from many different hands and skin tones—could help the team identify what the model gets right and where it needs refinement. Even in its current form, though, the feature reduces one of the hardest parts of buying nails online: trying to translate a beautiful product image into an answer to the much more personal question, But what will that look like on me?

And that is how my press-on nail obsession became an AI experiment nested inside another AI experiment.

One experiment is about whether a model can show me the nails before I buy them. The other is about whether a model can help me turn months of enthusiastic overthinking into a guide worth reading.

Both are still works in progress.

So am I.

But my nails look fantastic. 💅


P.S. - A quick disclosure: This post is not sponsored; I bought my Doonails with my own money. My referral link gives new customers $15 off a first order of $60 or more, and I’ll receive the same discount on a future order if you use it.

He was there. That’s the tribute. But you people want details, so.

We got married in the Class of 1959 Chapel at Harvard Business School — a piece of exquisite mid-century architecture whose ceiling windows throw rainbows down the walls and, at random, across the occasional upturned face. No one arranges it. The grandest decoration in the room is also the one nobody can aim; the light lands where it lands.

We did not get married and then hit the hard part. We were already in it. When I walked down the aisle in July of 2018, I was pregnant — too early to announce, but she was there, the two of us in that white dress. If you’d been paying close attention, you might have caught it: the bride drinking Spindrift, toasting with sparkling cider instead of champagne. A few people clocked the dry glass and knew exactly what it meant. (The transfer fell the day before my bachelorette — that was dry too.) Nobody said a word. The viability scan was already on the calendar for what should have been our “honeymoon.” The news there was not good. So the woman everyone was toasting was not at the start of a fairy tale. She was carrying a pregnancy she’d grieve within seven days, marrying a man who didn’t read the fine print and signed up anyway.

It took me thirty-nine years to find him, which felt at the time like a cosmic administrative error (the universe, apparently, had misfiled the paperwork) and turned out to be exactly on schedule — because the man I finally found was, it appears, custom-built for the specific catastrophe my life was about to become.

Here is the part that undoes me now. In his vows, standing there in a suit with no idea what was coming, he promised to be there “in everything we do, big and small, and especially in the challenges we encounter.” He promised to champion me and defend me. We’re a team until the end. People say things like that at weddings. They’re supposed to be beautiful prose, not prophecy. His turned out to be a to-do list. He read it out, in advance — in front of a beautiful stone altar, practically mounted on sturdy wheels — the exact job he’d be handed, and then, for eight years, he just did it, line by line, as if he were the lucky one.

And here’s the thing — he is not, by any reasonable account, a planner. Our officiant, in an otherwise flawless speech, described Turlach as “a planner, a thinker and problem solver,” and I am told that everyone in the chapel who actually knew Turlach had to physically resist the urge to pop up from their seat to object. A thinker and a problem solver — yes, to his core. Planner? Not so much. Left to his own devices, he’ll start cooking a full meal at 8pm and wonder why you’re not awake to partake. What he does is show up, every single day, for the thing in front of him, which it turns out is a completely different and far more useful trait when the thing in front of you is a disaster nobody could have planned for. He didn’t see it coming. He just never once didn’t come.

I said something too, that day, that I understand better now than I did when I said it: that his love grounds me and lets me go out into the world as the fullest expression of myself. I meant it as romance. Turns out, it’s architecture and mechanics, the scaffolding that partnership aspires to be. This newsletter — me, telling you the truth about a body that spent a decade being disbelieved — is the fullest expression of my self clawing its way back into the daylight. I could not be doing it without the ground he gives me to stand on. I named the reason at the altar and didn’t even know yet what I’d need it for.

He held me on the dining room floor after I collapsed at the news that our fourth pregnancy was going to be my third and final D&C. He was in the kitchen cooking dinner the night I got back up off a different floor in the living room — the one where our daughter and I built a wall of toy blocks — the first night I had the strength to get down there and, more to the point, get back up on my own. He got the girl dressed — to great comedic effect, in a red cat-print dress and mismatched grey-pastel-rainbow leggings and sunnies — and onto the school van solo, the morning a head cold flattened me. (A plain head cold. Not the Cushing’s. In this newsletter I try to keep my villains straight.) He never once made any of it a story about himself. He just kept showing up to do the damn thing, every damn day.

I’d like to tell you he’s a saint. He is not. He is irritable — a begrudger if ever there was one — he weaponizes fresh bread, and he keeps a running tally of the mice he’s dispatched, by hand, in defense of this household. Reader, I didn’t just marry him anyway. I married him because of it. Best decision from a body that has otherwise made some deeply questionable ones throughout its lifetime.

Eight years. Laugh, cry, good, bad, remission and relapse — it is all better with you.

Onward, my love. What’s next? ;p