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New Year's Resolutions for Laggers

Published by Starshine Roshell on January 15, 2015

Are you like me? Do you find yourself stranded in the middle of January without a single resolution for the New Year? Well, don’t panic. I have a plan for us both.

The reason I haven’t set any goals for 2015 is because it demands personal reflection, which is dreary, and accountability, which is yucky. So instead, I’m going to suggest terrific resolutions that you can make, dear reader. These will not only help you become a better human — they’ll make the world far more pleasant for me. Win-win!

Pick and choose your favorites, but get on it quick. I don’t want to see the old you ever again. This year, you will:

Stop checking your cell phone in a dark theater when there is a show going on. Or when you’re out with a friend, for god’s sake.
Break yourself of the ugly habit of darkening my doorstep with soul-saving literature of any sort.
Never again hawk a loogie where others can see it. Or (blech) hear it.
Realize that science is not, in fact, out to kill us, and vaccinate your damned children.
Refrain from saying “flushed out” when what you mean is “fleshed out.” You truly don’t want to flesh out anything that you would flush.

Any of these strike your fancy? No? That’s okay. I asked my friends to contribute some, too. They suggest that 2015 be the year you:

Learn how hashtags work or else leave them to the young.
Cover your mouth — with your arm, not your hand! eww! — when you sneeze or cough.
Stop tossing your cigarette butts out the window like the world is your ashtray, ashwipe.
Promise to get your next pet from a shelter.
Kindly quit using the phrases “I’m a chill dude” and “hit me up” on your online dating profile. You are not, and we will not.
Stop handing me receipts that are longer than my legs.
Quit inviting people to play games on Facebook. Any games. Just don’t.
Allow for the possibility that climate change is real and happening to you right this very minute.
Never again aim a camera at your food, no matter how picturesque. Your dinner is not the Grand Canyon.
Try really listening when someone is talking to you, rather than merely waiting for the moment you can jump in and talk about you again.
If you share a laundry room with others, clean out the dryer lint trap and remove your clothes shortly after they finish drying. Not the next day. Or the day after that. The dryer is not your personal bureau.
Resolve to stop pushing your lotion samples on us in your skeevy way at the mall.
Enough with the bacon thing. It’s over.
In the name of all that is holy, learn the difference between its and it’s, their and they’re, your and you’re, and to and too, and use them properly no matter where you are on the Internets. Get counseling if need be (quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl). This ends now.
Gladly share the gym’s weight machines with women because you are a gentleman, not a puffed-up, ‘roid-raging sexist.
Board the plane only when your group is called, and do not walk down the aisle with a backpack the size of a yak knocking into everyone you pass.
Don’t be a douche and stop wherever you feel like it in the school parking lot, and do pull all the way over when you hear a siren. It’s just not that hard.
Promise never to park like an idiot. Anywhere. But especially in front of my friend Kate Schwab’s office. Thank you.
Never again pick up your phone while driving. If we see you in our rearview mirrors using your phone, we will slam on our brakes and give you the opportunity to explain yourself to the cops — and to get that ding on our rear bumpers fixed on your dime.

A Letter to the Bullied

Published by Starshine Roshell on December 18, 2014

I can’t take this anymore. I can’t read one more news story about a child who committed suicide after being relentlessly bullied.

Bullying is the new smoking: The bad kids do it and always for terrible reasons. The schools are wallpapered with posters urging you not to do it. And apparently, bullying kills — far faster, in fact, than lung cancer does.

But I don’t want to talk about bullies, those cowardly cretins who think they can deflect attention from their own festering failures by kicking around someone who’s simply less inclined to be mean. It’s obvious; no one should harass or humiliate another person. But do you know what else shouldn’t happen? Children should not kill themselves. Ever. And that’s what I want to talk about.

This is a message for the bullied — a pissed-off missive for kids who’ve fallen prey to some loud-crowing schoolyard tyrant or cackling klatch of neighborhood creeps.

Dear Bullied Kid,

Yeah, you. The one wearing that mantle of shame. I’ll be honest: It doesn’t look great on you. It’s not your color, not your size. I see you in something more colorful — something lighter.

Word has it you’re being pestered by the local toughs. Do they say you’re weird? Call you a freak? Insist that you don’t fit in? Joke’s on them because you’re in great company: Nearly a third of American students say they’ve been bullied this year alone. That means one in every three kids on your block, your bus, your team feels the same way you do at any given moment.

Dating a Musician? I Recommend Bass Players

Published by Starshine Roshell on November 20, 2014

If there were a Pocket Field Guide to Dating Musicians, it would read like this:

This species can best be viewed in its natural habitat, under the colored lights of nightclub stages — and in the drier months, anywhere there’s free beer.

At the front stands the lead singer, scientific name Egos maximus, a close relative of the peacock. Don’t look him directly in the eye; he views this as a mating call and will rip his ironic T-shirt right off and begin caressing the mike suggestively if he thinks you’re the slightest bit interested.

To his left is the guitarist, Controli freakata, recognized in the wild by his rock-and-roll power stance, practiced indifference, and telltale markings: pants several sizes too small and bits of twine, locks of hair, and other strands of refuse wound round his wrist as boho jewelry. Beware: He is prone to depression; it’s when he writes “his best stuff.”

And making all that racket at the back, on the riser, is the grinning drummer, Rhythm perspiratious, descended more recently than the rest of us from apes. This good-time boy is a competent multitasker but frequently shamed by his bandmates for not knowing scales. Feeding habits: Large meat sandwiches that he stores in the bass drum and gnaws on between songs.

Then there’s the keyboard player, who … Wait, no. This isn’t 1985. There is no keyboard player.

But hark. What is that intriguing breed on the right? The one standing in the shadows with the quiet intensity and the booming, low-slung bass? That, my boyfriend-shopping adventurers, is the extraordinary Fella perfectata from the family Delicieux. His coat is less showy than the others’, so he often goes unnoticed. Yet he’s always there when you need him, steadily, deftly weaving the band’s rhythm and melody into an impenetrable humming-thumping-humming-thumping musical fabric that—scientifically speaking—you just want to wrap yourself up in. Naked.

Plan B Partners

Published by Starshine Roshell on November 6, 2014

See, I have this dress. It hangs unworn in my closet, flattened between more practical items. It doesn’t fit me well anymore — neither my body nor my lifestyle. It’s a little too short and show-offy.

But, man, there were a couple of years when it not only made me feel beautiful, stylish, and sexy, it made me become those things. That frickin’ frock was the crème de la closet.

There’s a foolishly optimistic part of me, a tiny gooey spot in my otherwise fully baked brain, that holds out hope I might someday rock that dress again and feel that good in it. And be that good in it.

And because that fantasy is so delicious — because the mere memory of wearing it guns my engine as I’m rifling through my wardrobe each day — I will never, ever give that dress away. It’ll hang there between my sensible skirts and other forgiving go-to garments until I’m too old even for those.

But I was surprised to learn recently that size-too-small dresses aren’t the only things that people keep simmering on the back burners of their lives. A study published in Computers in Human Behavior found that technology is making it easier than ever before for people to maintain a “backburner relationship,” or to stay in digital communication with someone they see as a potential future lover.

Here’s the surprising part: People in committed relationships have just as many “backburners” as single folks do. And these results jive with a recent Daily Mail survey revealing that half of married women have a “fall-back partner” in mind just in case their marriages go south.

Welcome to Parenting

Published by Starshine Roshell on October 23, 2014

I have a friend I adore. She’s smart, compassionate, funny, open-minded, and operates power tools. Correctly. So when she told me last week that she’s going to have a baby, I was ecstatic. More delightful people like her in the world? Huzzah!

We squealed and hugged and spoke of Storkish matters, the way girlfriends do: Nausea. Maternity leave. Glass of wine or no glass of wine. Modified yoga poses. And the alarming way her belly is widening in multiple directions — all at once.

But I left feeling that there should have been more to our chat. I wished we’d bounded — for just a few minutes — right over gestation and delivery to talk about actual harsh-light-of-day parenthood. Because making a baby is about more than making a baby; it’s about raising a child — which is Way. Exponentially. Huger.

So here’s what I wish I’d told my friend. Let’s call it What to Expect After You’re Expecting:

Having kids is, in every way imaginable, an extreme sport. Rife with dramatic contradictions, it’s the most draining and fulfilling thing you’ll ever feel utterly unqualified for.

Best Columnist 2014

Best Columnist 2014

Published by Starshine Roshell on October 16, 2014

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'80s Dancing Is the Only Tolerable Workout

Published by Starshine Roshell on October 11, 2014

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Pray Tell: The Hocus Pocus of Happy Thoughts

Published by Starshine Roshell on September 25, 2014

Heads up: This may offend you because I’m hurting and I haven’t the composure for caution or the patience for sensitivity just now.

I’ve never understood prayer. Don’t know the point of it, how it’s accomplished, or what the word means exactly. I’m atheist, so it’s probably not important that I understand prayer; it’s rarely aimed at me or asked of me. And yet — it’s all around me.

For the past six months, a young man I adore hung in the ruthlessly unfair, utterly unexpected balance between life and death. He struggled. He suffered. He should have been driving to off-campus lunches and asking a date to homecoming, but instead he was tubed and tested, monitored and medicated. And trapped. He was trapped.

And so there was prayer — daily, concerted, multi-faith prayer on this boy’s behalf. Prayer from friends, family, kindhearted strangers, and entire congregations who’ve never met the kid. Enough prayer to stop a white rhinoceros in its tracks.

Yet the bastard rhino kept charging, so tell me: What good is your prayer? Did it mean he could send the crash cart home for the night? Or get his breathing tube removed? Did it mean this kind, smart, funny, strong boy could bound free from the Critical Care Unit and go on about his otherwise promising life?

Women's Bits

Published by Starshine Roshell on September 11, 2014

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