Skip to content

Starshine Roshell Posts

No One Cares About Your Hymen

Tradition deems that a bride should give a few gifts on her wedding day. She might give jewelry to her bridesmaids and chocolates to her guests. She might bestow a monogrammed hankie on her mother, and will likely present her groom with a little sumpn special back at the hotel ifyouknowwhatimsayin.

But here’s a nuptial-day trinket you don’t often see a bride offer up in 2015: a note from her gynecologist to her father avowing that her hymen is thoroughly, virtuously intact. A Maryland bride did just that recently, posing with her dad, a big ole virginal grin, and a physician-signed “certificate of purity.”

Best Commenters: My Awards Back Atcha

What’s a writer without readers? That is to say, if I write a column in the forest and no one is there to post rude comments after it … did I even make a point?

Wired recently predicted the end of online comments sections, as Bloomberg, the Verge, the Daily Beast, and Motherboard have all eliminated the after-article comments features from their sites. I hope The Independent doesn’t follow suit. I often read the comments posted after my columns there to see what kinds of discussions are fueled, and if I’ve missed an important consideration in my thinking. Mostly, though, I find phrases like “giant turds” and “fat chicks” and comments like this one: “This is so stupid I could vomit.”

Lessons Learned from the Pit

stone-laugh

It was the second night of the school play. The show was called Crazy for You, a collection of jazzy Gershwin tunes, and I was on drums. I was ready. There was only one problem: I felt sick.

Somewhere in the acidic underbelly of my fleshy bits, my BBQ ribs from lunch churned a little. I excused it as nothing and strode over to my flashy drum set in the orchestra pit as the lights dimmed for the beginning of the show. I sat down and felt a little wave of nausea again.

I turned to my orchestra buddy and whispered, “Bro, I feel kinda sick.” He whispered back, “You’d better not throw up on me, man,” and the show began.

Love Makes You Fat. Here’s Proof.

7 Ways That Listicles Are Making Us Stupid or Why Are We Still Talking About Donald Trump?) So what’s the reason for this now officially undeniable link between mass and matrimony? There’s the obvious answer, of course: that once you’ve found a partner, you stop working so hard on your appearance. You skip a spinning class here and there, stop spending mornings wrestling with your straightening iron and — oh, what the hell — buy your first-ever pair of elastic-waist pants.

Can Transgender Folks Futz with Pronouns?

shoes!” Sheepishly, my son asked me why I referred to her as “her” when her biceps, Adam’s apple, and baritone growl indicated that she was a he. It was a fair question, but before I could craft a careful response, this tumbled out of my mouth: “Well … I guess because she’s gone to a whole lot of trouble to be perceived as a she … and frankly, what do I care?” Thus was my position on LGBT pronoun-ing established. Because I truly didn’t care. Why on earth shouldn’t people be called what they want to be called? I’m no us-versus-them gal. I’m a fiendishly tolerant liberal; I don’t give a flying flush who’s allowed into the ladies’ room — and you can’t make me squirm. … Except that I’ve recently changed my mind. And I’m squirming.

Crude Awakening: When the $#!% Hits the Sand

Where else would she live?! It’s easy to understand how we earned our highbrow nicknames: The American Riviera and the Galapagos of the North. And it’s usually quite easy to forget that at any given moment, countless gallons of toxic, black sludge are whooshing silently through pipelines beneath our shores.