Rebecca A. Foster

The chopsticks I brought home from China are all stainless steel or melamine (melamine: okay for chopsticks! Not okay for milk!), but I have a few sets of wooden ones I brought home from Thailand several years ago. I put all the chopsticks in my dishwasher to sterilize them but most ended up in the bottom near the drain, and one of the wooden ones was snapped in half. Oops. Preface: I have this big, passion-from-across-the-room crush on our apt.'s head maintenance guy, V.  He's Chilean, looks like a Spanish soccer player and has gorgeous hazel/green eyes. I met him the day I moved in and I've only run into him twice since them but both times he remembered me and we chatted and he's charming and did I mention, super hot? This guy + light eyes = V.  Thus far, I have avoided purposefully breaking things in my apartment so he has to come fix them. I know, right? I'm so adult and stuff. But ever since the chopstick incident, my dishwasher doesn't drain properly...

Guys, I can't think of anything to write about for 'X'. I've been delaying and delaying and...nothing. X marks none of my spots. Sorry, X. In lieu of X, here's a picture of me when I was a toddler. I found this picture because V. and I were walking down the street one day and he asked me what my natural hair color is. I told him, "It's pretty close to the color it is now." "But your hair is like three different colors." I remember feeling flattered he'd noticed my hair at all. So when I got home I dug this out of my electronic files to show him my natural hair color is pretty close to his: black. And also to show him I'd mastered jazz hands at an early age. (Well, my left hand did.) My favorite part of this picture, though, is my red tights. My mom was always dressed us very fashionably. Pretty sure I was also wearing matching red Buster Brown shoes. I don't think there was a time between ages 1 and 10 I didn't own a ...

Something I Love: www.awkwardfamilyphotos.com . If you haven't seen this site, you should go there as fast as your little fingers will type you there. (Bonus China points for scrolling through the site in your underwear, licking frosting off a knife, like I did last night.)  This one is hands down my favorite one . That disembodied pacifier head! Runner up favorite: The Nativity.  And a special thanks to my mom and dad, who never subjected us to this kind of thing. We owe you one!

Othello is my favorite board game AND my favorite Shakespearean play, but this post is about the board game.  If you've never played Othello, it sounds easy: you and a partner each choose a color (black or white) then attempt to turn all the wafers on the board to your color. You do this by taking turns placing wafers on the board and trying to surround your opponent's wafers with one of your own color at either end; a wafer is flipped to be the color of the most recent tiles surrounding it.  I learned to play it at around age 7, with my grandpa; it's a great game for kids to play with adults because it has simple rules and requires few verbal skills, but can help kids sharpen logic and strategy skills. It's a visual logic game, not a game of chance. And it's not a game you "master"; ideally, you continue to play against a partner that matches your skill level and continues to challenge you. Try it! You might like it. 

I subscr ibe to the sociocultural theory that on a subconcious level, straight men want to sleep with women who look like they have a high rate of fertility (large chest, curvy waist, youthful in appearance etc., and yes ewww calling it that, but what else do you call it?), while straight women want to sleep with men they think would make good genetic partners.* I also think this is why men sometimes get tagged as shallow creatures who'll "sleep with anything" whereas women are deemed less promiscuous. We're not, we're just using different criteria. If you met 100 men who fulfilled the genetic criteria, you'd be attracted enough to want to sleep with those 100 men. Men get some broader leeway, as she just has to look like someone who could get knocked up, if they so desired. (Whether the man or the woman actually wants to accomplish these tasks is beside the point. This is subconscious desire, not conscious logic.) Men want to perpetuate their genes, women wan...

I admire the Buddhist ethos that not being attached to things allows you to live free. I try to live by this ideal. I am definitely a minimalist. The bedroom and backyard in the picture to the left are pretty much my ideal living space. It drives me crazy to go into people's homes that are just crammed with furniture. But books? Books are where my good intentions fall apart. Walking into a library or an old-school bookstore (read: not Borders) is like walking into a church for me. One of my faves: Sam Weller's. The basement is aisles and aisles of niche, obscure and used books and I'd move in if they'd let me. I kept my books in boxes for several months when I first moved back to spend time with my dad. I felt like a huge part of my life was missing. It was a relief when I could finally unpack them all and have access to them again. I'd make a terrible Buddhist in this regard. (The bookcase on the far right doesn't match because my grandfather made it by hand an...