Archive (Page 2) • On / Off • Buttondown

Jackson, Mississippi

February 24, 2022

I know, I know, I keep talking about Real Queer America, the audiobook that I've been listening to. It's because I tend to listen to it in the mornings while...

Travel Daydreams

February 22, 2022

For today's newsletter, I feel like daydreaming. Earlier in this newsletter cycle I wrote about my road trip daydreams, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, today's...

~*~just queer things~*~

February 21, 2022

FYI: I don't think this newsletter is super heavy, but it's not as cute as its title implies. I'm still listening to the audiobook Real Queer America, which...

Try Again on Monday

February 17, 2022

During this run of newsletters, there have been a couple of days when I really haven't felt like writing. Today is one of those days. I don't feel...

Assigned Sex

February 16, 2022

My mom didn't know her kids' assigned sexes until we were born. She thought for sure that I was a boy and tells the story like this: the midwife delivered...

Tomato Head

February 15, 2022

This is just a quick, evening edition of On / Off because I had an appointment with my ob-gyn this morning at the time when I normally write this newsletter....

Utah

February 14, 2022

Over the weekend I started listening to the audiobook Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States by Samantha Allen. I first heard about this book from...

Road Trip Daydreams

February 10, 2022

My German driver's license arrived in the mail today! You might recall that I applied to convert my Massachusetts driver's license to a German one back in...

3 Things You Can Read Instead of This Newsletter...

February 9, 2022

...because I wasn't up for writing an issue of On / Off today. These AI-generated Valentine's Day cards from the website AI Weirdness by Janelle ShaneThis...

Organs on the Move

February 8, 2022

At this point, I am 20-weeks pregnant, which means I'm halfway through this strange process and it shows. The bump is still small compared to what it will...

Feeling Ready to Have a Kid

January 18, 2022

Basically everyone we've told about my pregnancy has been congratulatory. A couple of people have asked if it was planned, wanting to get a read on our...

Getting Through January

January 17, 2022

I'm sure there have been years when I've enjoyed January (January 2019 when E and I spent 3 weeks in Kenya springs to mind), but this year I'm just trying to...

The Mystery of the Baking Cookies Smell

January 13, 2022

Back in December, about a week before Christmas, we got a couple of inches of snow, just enough to stick in the trees and fully cover the grass and feel a...

I Wish I Were a Polyglot (Part 3)

January 12, 2022

There's a standard measure of language proficiency that's used in Europe (CEFR) and includes six levels: A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2, with A1 being total...

I Wish I Were a Polyglot (Part 2)

January 11, 2022

My Spanish was rusty when I first started learning German, but Spanish had been carving out space in my brain since I was 14 years old. This meant that, for...

I Wish I Were a Polyglot (Part 1)

January 10, 2022

"I wish I were a polyglot" was a phrase I used to include in my social media bios, gosh, a decade ago at this point. But it's a feeling that has cropped up...

Books!

January 6, 2022

All week, I've been wanting to write a newsletter about some of the media that I enjoyed in 2021 -- books, tv shows, movies, and video games. Throughout the...

Dreams (Part 2)

January 5, 2022

Last night, I dreamed that the baby had arrived, and we weren't prepared. I didn't dream about labor and delivery or bringing the baby home, and I had no...

No Newsletter Today

January 4, 2022

By which I actually mean, a very short newsletter. Yesterday, I spent way more than an hour on the newsletter. This was fine because the one-hour constraint...

A little bit of reflecting on 2021

January 3, 2022

Last week, we had some unseasonably warm days here in Berlin. Temperatures were in the 50's and so E and I took our morning coffees out onto our balcony,...