until the fourth grade, i lived with my dad, brother and sister in gentle suburban massachusetts where i could ride my bike to school. my mom, however, rode and trained horses for a living, so she and my stepdad lived on a big, beautiful farm in virginia. it was my favorite place in the world, but life on a farm is very different from life, like, anywhere else. for one thing, i sometimes had to shovel another animal’s poop from one location to a different, slightly farther lo

growing up, for the most part, i really liked school and didn’t mind getting up in the morning to attend it. which is not to say that school really liked me, because i was actually...kind of a monster child in elementary school. two of my siblings and i had the same fourth grade teacher and at the end of the year i asked her who her favorite was and she slow-blinked at me for a really, really long time before saying carefully, “well, you caused more havoc than both your broth

dear neighbor, who, for the purposes of this letter, will be named todd, listen. i know i eat a lot of takeout. maybe, arguably, i eat "too much" takeout. maybe i need to "reign in" my "problem." maybe "most people aren't on a first-name basis with the delivery people at their favorite indian restaurant," and maybe "most restaurants don't automatically take the bell peppers out of your panang curry even when you forget to add it as a special request because they know you like

i really love wine. the thing you have to know about me is that fundamentally, to my core, the only thing i really want out of life is to never be gauche or rude, ever, ever. every single one of the mistakes that haunt my dreams are times where i blithely said or did something that violated a rule i didn’t know or maybe just forgot. i live in constant fear of getting sent to the Principal’s Office of Life, where i imagine an old lady with all of the characteristics of a cat i

believe it or not, "trashbag" is a compliment. OKAY SO THE THING ABOUT TRASHBAG DONUTS IS: i worked at a camp for kids the summer that I was 20. and part of that meant eating the same things that the kids ate, being on the same nutritional plan. which was great, you know, because it was theoretically a good nutrition plan and we should all treat our bodies like temples OR WHATEVER. but the tHING WAS, right, that sometimes, sometimes, you just. you just want JUNK FOOD. you jus

contrary to what i feel like might be popular belief, i didn’t get up to too many hijinks in high school. i mean, i was in our version of detention a lot but that was for things like “skipping breakfast” and “being late always” and “writing an inflammatory speech about how unfair it was that we had to eat breakfast in the dining hall when we could be using that time to SLEEP” and “dyeing my hair with bright streaks against the express written rules of the student handbook”. o

i have always had a somewhat tenuous relationship with fire. when i was in argentina i did a homestay and my housemom, MonMons (real name monica, insisted that “everything you put into your body is trash” which, in her defense, was true) had one of those gas stoves that you have to light with an actual match. i don’t know if any of you have spent any time on this blog but like the absolute LAST thing i would put in baby!mollyhall’s hands is GASOLINE and MATCHES. i was terrifi

in hindsight, honestly, i'm MORE surprised it didn't happen sooner. back when i lived with my dad, until i was 10 or so, we used to go skiing every (almost every??? many???? idk, i’m bad at time intervals) winter vacation. my dad’s family unit (brother-sister-stepmom-dad) was very athletic. my brother and sister were always doing Sport Things. i was not always doing Sport Things. i couldn’t catch a Sport Ball if you put superglue on my hands. Exasperated Coaches &; Me, A

i don't know a LOT about robbery but i DO know that you should go into it with a gameplan. so when i was studying in argentina, it was like a thursday, and they were having what’s called a “feria” which is kind a holiday?? in argentina sometimes they decide to CANCEL EVERYTHING, ostensibly to celebrate things like books and students but i suspect really so that nobody has to go to work. argentina gets me. ANYWAY, i decided that day to go the gym! this was new and different fo

this isn't really a "story" so much as a "PSA about email safety." when i was in undergrad i wrote my thesis on translations of shakespeare's hamlet in spain. but in order to do that i needed to actually, you know, get my hands on some of those translations, which were like... hundreds of years old. you can't really download an epub of the 1772 de la cruz. trust me, i tried. i was like, "yo amazon, what do you have with regard to like 18th-century hamlet translations?" amazon

i'm sorry, paul. DISCLAIMER: i have no memory of this story. this is just a story that has been told to me SO MANY TIMES that quite frankly i’m not sure whether i remember bits of it or if i’ve just been incepted. so my grandparents used to have a house in jamaica (my grandparents lived… a very different life… than i live). for a while my nana started semi-permanently living there, and my mom was like, “you know what’s better than being in america??? BEING IN JAMAICA, YO MO

life on the farm is weird and has gone a long way toward preparing me for the weirdness that is adult life. so something that you have to understand about my mom is that she loves animals. like you know that girl in your middle school that was like I FCUKIN LOVE HORSES *___*!!!! and always interrupted every conversation with some Cat Facts? that’s my mom. my mom feeds wild deer, which—as anyone who lives in the country will tell you—is a TERRIBLE IDEA, BECAUSE DEER, WHILE BEA

she was stone cold. the woman has ice in her veins. around christmastime a few years ago—let’s say 5 years? maybe 6? i don’t know, some time between 2005 and 2010. this morning i referred to something that happened when i was four as “the other day,” so don’t ask me these things—i was spending christmas with my father and his side of the family. MY FATHER’S FAMILY, A 2005ish to 2010ish RETROSPECTIVE: my dad, a 6’4 Mister Dad, who just looks like he should be wearing a tweed s

learn your lessons well: you are not more powerful than hallucinogens. so ambien can be a really good drug for people with bad insomnia. but when my doctor prescribed it to me, she looked me dead in the eyeballs and said, “take this when you are ready to sleep. keep it on your bedside table. when you are in bed, lights off, ready to go, take one of these pills. don’t take one of these pills at any other time.” i was like, “yo, doc, recreational drug use is just not really on

stay in school, kids. hmmmmm. so while i was at boarding school i took ap physics, which was a bad decision for all parties involved because a) as a pigeon-toed loser with a center of gravity her body doesn’t know what to do with, physics has never done anything but betray me, and b) i’m not very good at math. the good thing about AP classes is that you only have to take the actual school exam once, at midterms. the bad thing about AP classes is that you have to take the AP e

I AM EXTREMELY STRONG. the summer that i was about thirteen or fourteen, my mother decided to buy a la-z-boy for my stepdad, skip, for their anniversary. she did this because my mother loves giving presents and my stepdad loves sitting down. she needed someone to help transport the chair from the furniture store back to our house. my brother was, at the time, at Sports Camp For Young Boys Who Want To Be Good At Sports And Other Things Too, Like Tying Knots And Spitting, Proba

i know my mother loves me. but. so obviously the problem with listening to country music too much is that it is a constant reminder of my wayward youth growing up on a farm in virginia, and all the stupid shit i used to get up to while my poor mother ran after me waving her hands in the air shouting things like, "why are there eggs on the garage door????" and, "HOW did you end up in LOUISA COUNTY??? YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE IN SCHOOL," and, "YOU'RE GOING TO GET THE PLAGUE IF YOU

i was a terrible bartender, and everybody knew it. when i lived in spain, i worked as a “bartender” in madrid. i put “bartender” in quotation marks because my boss fernando trusted me with literally nothing but cleaning glasses and occasionally a CLOSELY SUPERVISED mojito. the bar was called “la chocita sueca,” which basically means “the swedish hut,” but can also, as far as i can tell, mean something VERY DIFFERENT and vERY RUDE. this led to a lot of general confusion from t

ginna and i remember this story differently, but this is my blog, so i get to tell it how i want. my school had this thing called “senior skip day,” except that senior skip day didn’t exist and every year the administration sent out emails in the spring that were like DON’T FUCKIN SKIP CLASS OR YOU WILL RECEIVE RESTRICTION (restriction was like, my boarding school’s equivalent of detention where instead of staying after school you had to go to bed early and help stuff envelop

the problem with pay-per-view is that you have to pay per view. so here’s a fun story about the first wives club. guess who loves this movie? me! i do! i love this movie. i love this movie so much that when i was in the 7th grade and i saw “first wives club 2” on pay per view i was like: HELL YEAH!! FIRST WIVES CLUB TWO!! NO ONE TOLD ME THERE WAS A SEQUEL!!! here’s the synopsis for first wives club 2: disgruntled first wives take their ex-husbands’ new lovers under their wing