At least once a week, my mother tells me about running into someone in our hometown. I always ask, “How’s she doing?” That is the question I ask. The question my mother answers is, “How much does she weigh?”

Occasionally, she will say, “She looks wonderful! She started running,” or “Rail-thin since her husband left. I hope she can keep it off.”

But since Kentucky is in the Diabetes/Bible belt, more often than not, she sighs and says with a quiver in her voice, “Oh, Becca. She’s big as a house.” …

Ladies, we’ve all heard the mantra for preventing urinary tract infections: drink cranberry juice, urinate before, after, or during sex — I can never remember which — and most importantly, wipe front to back. If you’re like me, you thought to yourself, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever, doctor, you’re not the boss of me.” But after my last UTI, I figured, what the hell, and decided to give it a shot.

This is what I learned.

Nobody Cares

Seriously, nobody. Not even my mother, who has basically been stalking me since I was born: invading my privacy, taking my picture without…

1. Make weekly trips into town for food and supplies — no more deliveries.
2. Pry up floorboards, get money and take it to the bank.
3. Send semi-feral children to fancy schoolhouse for book learning.
4. Gaze upon failed kitchen garden and plot revenge on Eastern Gray Squirrels and the know-it-all jackass who suggested growing vegetables in the first place. Also, find a recipe for squirrel.
5. Let census taker out of the cellar as soon as she promises to keep her trap shut about how messy this house is.
6. Eat a sandwich made from store-bought bread.
7. Gather family to stand in line for…

Merry Christmas, Lauren! It’s me, your Herpes Simplex. I hope it’s okay to drop onto your lower lip like this. Sorry, I’m such a mess. I barely had a chance to crust over. It looks like I made it in the nick of time, though.

Wow! Everybody’s here. Honestly, I just feel grateful to be included.

Is that your cousin, Kelly? Your mom’s right; she gets prettier and prettier. She’s a doctor? With three kids? How on Earth does she do it? …

The United States of “America” America, 244, debuted her transformed body on multiple media platforms Saturday. While many applauded the representative democracy on her svelte new form, some on social media worried America was promoting dangerous, outdated standards of government body types. Commenters on Twitter questioned whether discussing a country’s size was ever appropriate.

America quickly responded to the controversy with the following statement on her Instagram.

“I believe in body neutrality. Whatever our size, we should all be comfortable, confident, and accepted. My weight loss was never about looking a certain way; it was about improving my health.

In…

It never fails. Every Halloween, bats get an image makeover. Suddenly, we are all supposed to pretend they’re cute. My daughter starts drawing flattering pictures and spouting off bat trivia like some miniature David Attenborough — without the raw sexuality, obviously. I nod along and feign interest in her flying fox slide show because I don’t have the heart to tell her the truth.

Bats suck! And here’s why.

1) COVID-19 isn’t the bat’s first rodeo.

Ebola, SARS, MERS, not to mention rabies, bats have had their hideous, skeletal claws all over every single one of them. Have you seen…

When I was 23, my dog Grunt and I moved from Kentucky to Seattle. Within a month, I was riding a bus to work, eating Chinese food from paper cartons, and dating a Jewish guy. It was a world I had only seen on television: a 1990’s sitcom that remembered Asian people.

Seattle had everything — hiking, museums, ferries, cool bars and restaurants. My favorite thing, though, was the dog parks. Parks just for dogs! I was blown away. These parks were substantially nicer than most of the parks for people in Kentucky. …

I won’t make you wait for the answer. It’s the American Robin. Hands down. No contest.

Robin mating looks like a high five that keeps missing. It’s like they’re wrestling, and their genitals accidentally stick together for a second. It’s how perverts think sorority pillow fights work.

Chicken sex looks like an assault; robin sex looks like neither one is consenting. It’s objectively the worst.

Who am I to judge bird sex, you ask? Over the last decade, I planted dozens of native shrubs and perennials in my yard. I was only hoping to observe birds eating seeds and whatnot…