Emily McCombs

This may sound weird, but I want my own Hillary Clinton doll. I want to have her give State of the Unions on what’s in my fridge. I want to dress her up in tiny pantsuits. (I’ll place them over the one she’s already wearing.)

My son is particularly anxious about death. He’s generally sensitive — he’s yet to make it through a full movie because anytime there’s a minor conflict he gets too upset and we have to turn it off. We left Zootopia in the theater when the big animals were being too “mean” to the rabbit. We left a screening of Toy Story in the park because he got too anxious when Woody and Buzz got left at the gas station. (We didn’t make it to the genuinely terrifying broken toy hybrids.)

Sometimes I imagine what life would be like if I had lived back before glasses and contacts were invented and I couldn’t see anything and just had to fumble around blindly squinting at everything. Or before antidepressants, and I just had to spend my whole life crying in bed. Both those options still seem more manageable than living life without the ability to watch 6-10 episodes of a television show in one sitting.

We were at a karaoke bar on a weeknight. I was sitting near a wall-length mirror, and I felt self-conscious about my body. 

It’s summer, and if there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that you’re disgusting. You think you can just stuff any old body into a bathing suit? You need a special license for that. Nobody on the Internet even wants to masturbate to you!

According to Suicide.org, about 33 percent of rape victims have suicidal thoughts, and 13 percent of rape victims will attempt suicide. Often this happens many years after the assault. Rape isn’t a crime that ends when the physical act is over — it is a crime that lingers.

When you get a massage somewhere “nice,” they often have a little box to check regarding the gender of your masseuse.

...[B]eing among the dead rightsizes my problems, makes me feel small like staring at the ocean. After all, we are all being carried along toward the same inevitable fate as the men and women whose headstones I pass on my daily strolls. The best we can hope for is that someday someone will stop to calculate our ages and wonder about our lives after we’re gone.

I decided to spend a few hours running errands in the summer sunshine while audaciously wearing a loose-fitting baby doll dress, comfy flats, and a denim vest. Apparently my need to keep my legs ventilated served as a Bat-Signal to the fine men of Gotham, who were drawn by its golden glow to yell stuff at me every five minutes.

I’m sure the Pokemon Go phenomenon will fade before long, but for the moment, it’s just dumb FUN that might even be good for you. The game cannot fix and should not distract us from the shit-fucking terrible goddamn week we’ve had in the world, but it can remind us that we all need to practice self-care, whatever package it comes in.