Jody Amable

In the aftermath of my mom passing, I've learned to reconcile our rocky relationship with the knowledge that she loved me.

A few weeks back, I got looped into an Instagram chat with some coworkers from one of my gigs, who were snarking about the fact that the

Jon Stewart, step aside. Your heir apparent has arrived.

If I let everyone off the hook for extenuating circumstances like, “He’s over 50, so he probably just doesn’t know any better,” no one’s ever going to stop calling me “sweetie.”

Creator of grungy, gritty rock and roll with a poet’s heart, her critically-lauded record, Beyond the Bloodhounds, tells tales of a tumultuous childhood and split geographical identity.

Harnessing the courage within myself—courage I didn’t even know I had—to coolly, calmly call this guy out has made me a better human being.

I'm 30 years old and stuck in San Jose, the hometown I always wanted to leave. What happened?

No matter how drunk he is, he can’t NOT notice this. His hand is moving. What do I do? What do I do? Do I politely ask him to stop? Do I yell at him? Do I wheel around and whack him in the face? You don’t know what he’s doing, Jody. Calm down. Don’t make a scene.

The neighbors turned their lights off. My dog fell sound asleep. I kept reading. And at 1:03 am, I finished. All was well.

Forget a cute story of wizard wonderment — the real moral of Harry Potter is that life is an endless parade of pain and turmoil where you have to watch everyone you’ve ever loved die.