What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

a house full of cats used to be the sign of a terminally single woman, but now it’s a house full of souvenirs acquired on foreign adventures.

I say that plane tickets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women’s progress as a gender. I’m damn proud of us.

if you go to a tourism office in Iceland, you will see that on their official tourist map, in addition to the drawings delineating the locations of whales, puffins, and waterfalls, there are drawings of fairies, gnomes, ghosts, and trolls.

Israelis have no patience for niceties or bullshit or small talk. They love direct questions and will always give you direct answers. They thrive on the probing and the personal, and delight in finding ways to laugh at things that are heavy and dark. Which is my specialty.

“In Judaism, the way you learn to love someone is by giving to them,” she said. “The more you give to a person, the more you end up loving them. If love is just a feeling, and that feeling changes, then what? Love has to be something you choose to build.”