Bread and Bread

AK and I have very different relationships to illness. I have a high pain threshold but worry that every new ache or bump or freckle is a sign of a life-threatening illness. AK is not a worrier, period, but when she’s hurting, you’re gonna know about it. She would, preferably, like a battalion of friends to gather round with chicken soup anytime she coughs. This morning I had a follow-up to my 2009 boob ultrasound , which I’d been worrying about off and on for weeks. In a heroic attempt to let me get some sleep in my precarious mental state, AK threw our noisy cats out of the room at 6 a.m. On the way back to bed, she slammed her toe into the cat tree and broke it. So, as you can imagine, we were both at our best. The good news is that my boobs are cancer-free (so when some guy leaned out of his car and yelled, “Nice titties!” on my way home, I had to agree). A trip to urgent care confirmed that AK’s pinky has a spiral-shaped fracture (that is her actual x-ray on the left...

I had a very important epiphany yesterday, about why I love Parks and Recreation so much. I was reading this Ironing Board Collective post about New Girl , a show in which three normal guys suffer the hijinks of a zany girl who, if she existed in real life would be 1) totally dysfunctional and/or 2) really hurt by the crap they say to her. This is the premise of a lot of TV shows and movies, although usually it’s a guy being immature and a boring, normal woman enduring him. So, um, score one for feminism? And of course there are the shows where all the characters relentlessly sling insults at each other: Two and a Half Men, 2 Broke Girls . Occasionally the insults are irresistibly witty, but mostly…I can resist. So here’s why Parks and Recreation is great: The characters aren’t always nice to each other, but they care what their peers think, and when there’s conflict, they react the way actual humans would. Recently* Ann spent most of an episode trying to get Ron and April—...