Bread and Bread

The other day I bought the January issue of O, The Oprah Magazine because AK wasn’t feeling well and the cover featured Oprah posing in an emerald green dress next to a lion, and I thought it would make her laugh. It's all about me-ow. It’s fun to make fun of O because Oprah is powerful and ubiquitous and prone to let-them-eat-cake moments; because, like every other women’s magazine, it’s obsessed with self-improvement; and because, well, see lion cover above. But of all the magazines you can impulse-buy at the checkout counter, it’s one of the best. It takes books seriously. It features women of color regularly. And even though Oprah’s always on us to be our best selves, it turns out that the resolution-oriented articles in the January issue are pretty sensible. I have a complicated relationship with self-improvement. I think our (American? female?) obsession breaks us down and gets us to buy shit more often than it lifts us up. On my blog and in my life, I want ...

Since AK has been in school, our church-going has gotten way less frequent. This became extra clear yesterday when I saw a guy walk into Starbucks and found myself thinking, What is on his forehead? An extra eyeball? Some kind of medical implant? He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d be rocking a face tattoo. Don’t stare! Don’t stare! Then I realized it was Ash Wednesday. Today being, what, Freshly Scrubbed Thursday?, I’m a little late to the Lent game, but I’m going to play anyway. Here’s what I’m giving up. 1. Changing the subject to myself. This is an extension of my “listen and lurk” New Year’s resolution, which I’ve been plugging away at with mixed results. Did I ever tell you about the time my favorite college roommate Amber told me I had a habit of interrupting people to tell stories about myself? (I realize I just told you a story about myself, but you clicked something to get here—I’m not interrupting anything except whatever you should be doing instead of fu...

If you read my everyone’s a critic post, you can probably guess how much I loved this post on Bluebird Blvd. , in which Courtenay Bluebird assumes the persona of all those magazines that profess to make us (us = especially women) feel better and usually have the opposite effect . It’s enough to make a girl want to retreat to a cabin in the woods and light a giant fireplace fire with magazines as kindling.* Except then I’d get bored and wish for something to read. Can I make a humble addition to Bluebird’s list from my own monthly mail pile? Hi, I’m REDBOOK . I’m a gift from your really nice sister, whose generosity you totally appreciate . I make you feel weirdly middlebrow—and therefore snobby about feeling not good about feeling middlebrow—whenever you read me. Also, old. And then ageist about feeling not good about feeling old. Sometimes I have refreshing, if mildly simplistic, articles about transgender issues and infertility. But this month is my “Confess...