Over the past weekend, music correspondent and PR guy Eric Alper posed a question on Twitter that got me thinking:

Is it cool to talk about Vocal here on Medium? I don’t want to make a faux pas, but I just really want to talk about Vocal for a minute. I did a quick search and see a few stories talking about Vocal and the authors are still active, so it must be okay.

To be honest, this story is less about Vocal and more about me. Me and my sour, crabby, pucker-inducing grapes.

You see, I joined Vocal with a free account a few months back, but I balked at their high monthly fee (thank you for keeping it…

“I have to go,” he says, sitting up unexpectedly in my bed.

“What?” I ask, both startled and insecure. He is way out of my league and I am still so inexperienced. I’ve never had a boyfriend and he certainly isn’t that. Not yet.

“Can you smell it?” he asks.

I sniff the air and can only smell the scent of my clean sheets and his Polo cologne. “Smell what?”

“The dew. It’s that time of the night. I have to go cut hay.”

“At 2:30 in the morning?”

Pulling on his boots and sliding his battered gray Stetson onto…

When we said “I do” it was the best day of our lives. We took a modest honeymoon, yeah okay it was just a weekend backpacking trip, and then came home to our too small and much too dingy rental apartment.

It took us five years to both save and borrow enough money to buy our own house. The real estate listing called it a “cottage with old world charm.” In truth it was a very small two bedroom that needed a lot of work. It was in a decent neighborhood and just barely within our price range.

All the…

It’s hardly a hot take to say I’m watching the hit Apple+ show Ted Lasso. It’s even less of a hot take to say that I really like it. (Though apparently still liking the show in Season 2 is cheugy)

There is just something special about this show that centers on an American football coach recruited to be the manager of an English premier league football (i.e. soccer) team, despite having no experience with the non-American kind of football.

The show brings the best of both English and American sitcom culture into one place. Aspects such as the English cultural…

The sun, it hurts. It’s drumming into my skull and when I partially open my eyes, I realize that I am not in my bed. I am on the couch and this is not optimal.

I think back but thinking hurts, too. I try to remember. We had a party last night. Me and my five roommates and two large kegs. If we had a party and I’m waking up on the couch, that means I made the substantial error of getting blackout drunk. The unwritten rule is you have to mess with the guy who can’t hold his liquor.

…

As a native New Mexican, there are two books about my home state that I love very much. One is Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford and the other is The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols.

In The Milagro Beanfield War, there is a perfect scene where a PhD student from New York shows up in a very small northern New Mexican town. He is a fish out of water and this old lady, someone’s abuela, hides behind a low wall and throws small pebbles at him nonstop with pinpoint accuracy. Plink. Plink!

I love that scene. You…

This morning I did something that I do not understand but I am grateful for anyway.

Background: I am not a morning person. At all. Ever. Not my whole life.

“Oh, your tune will change when you get older!” Nope, nada, nein. I am hardly alive until 9:30am, sometimes as late as 10:00am in the morning.

But this morning my body decided not sleeping was going to be the way. This has started to happen more often than I’d like, and I was up very early. Right in that hour when the dark gives way to light.

Feeling rested, I…