You’re welcome, penguins.

Until February my apartment was usually filled with flies. 

I know what you’re thinking: “That seems normal, flies aren’t anything to worry about” but it still always bothered me, sort of a nagging, dark cloud, a cloud of flies that is, hovering slowly around my apartment like a small horrible indoor weather system.

It was the plants that were causing the problem, if you considered it a problem. The flies would just sort of emanate from them. I thought maybe these particular plants grew flies instead of flowers, or that dirt was made from ground-up fly eggs. It seemed possible, I don’t know much about plants. But I still liked having them. I loved having them.

The best way to show plants you love them is to water them at least once a day. Twice a day if you think of it. And the best sort of plants to buy are ones that say they need to be watered once a week or less - those plants are low maintenance. Plants are beautiful and fun but after a few days they always turn brown and soft and then the flies come and the plants get super dead and I know what you’re thinking: How could this possibly be happening. It defies logic.

Then one day in January I accidentally left one of my plants behind a bookcase and forgot it existed. Safely out of reach from my care it transformed into a completely healthy plant, no more flies, green and vibrant and adorable.

So I did a little research, which is my second-favorite thing to do (my favorite thing is to do a lot of research) and found out that my plants not only don’t need the love I was giving them, but due to the humidity of my apartment, need no love at all. The most informative article summarized them as plants that “thrive under neglect.”

Those three words seemed a little harsh. The gardening article was a little too personal. Because looking at the healthy plant refugee made me think of all the other terrifying ways I try to make the world better, and made me wonder if they had failed as conclusively. The middle school girl I mentored, the birthday card someone at work asked me to sign, that blind French man I tried to help in the subway and ended up getting us both lost in a corner because I didn’t know the French word for “turnstile.” And the woman in Namibia I bought a cow for last year. Looking at my plants made me sure things with that cow must have gone horribly.

The list of well-intentioned things I had done during my life was suddenly disconcerting long.

Luckily less than a heartbeat later I had already thought of all the things I neglect every day. Thank goodness I didn’t knit any sweaters for those penguins, or remember to call my former roommate on her birthday. I’ve never played that game where you have to know vocab words to give people rice, and my mom wouldn’t let me be a Girl Scout. How many times had someone posted on Facebook about something where I needed to call a congressperson and tell them something was important to me, and I didn’t call them? That must have happened ten thousand times. 

So now I keep my plants by the window, untouched, unloved, and thriving, healthier than any plants I have ever had, after nine years of plant-ownership. I look at them every morning from a safe distance while I swallow a fistful of vitamins. As long as I don’t have too much of a hand in it, it’s going to be another great day.

These aren’t my plants, but I don’t have a good picture of my plants.

These aren’t my penguins either, but if they're yours I'd like to meet them.

What your kids will be like

A few months ago my friend told me that his wife is working at a daycare, and that it’s “the best birth control ever.” 

And I feel like it’s important enough that I tell not just him but everyone: if your wife is working at a day care, you also need to also be using a second form of birth control. I didn’t pay a ton of attention in health class but even with my limited knowledge of reproduction I know that using a part-time day care job as your main method of birth control lowers the chances of pregnancy by about zero percent, in every study.

It seems especially important to remember this because of something that happened the other day in the locker room. There was a mom teaching her toddler to poop, but the toddler was stalling. (Get it! It’s a bathroom joke!)

“Where do babies come from?” the toddler asked in an “I bet this question is going to annoy you and that makes me so psyched to ask you” sort of way. Her mom referenced some vague story about sperm meeting an egg.

“But how?”

Her mom changed the subject: “Do you remember, in your All About Me book, who does your body belong to? Who’s in charge of your body?”

“My body belongs to a man!” she yelled. I don't think she learned it in the All About Me book, I think she probably learned it during the nine months she was living inside her mom, connected to her brain, learning what she could do that would bother her the most. That's where I got all of my best material.

Then the girl just started screaming swear words, which I won't type here in case some of my readers are under three and haven’t learned them yet.

Babies can come from anywhere, the jury’s still out on the logistics and even the All About Me book doesn't have all the facts. If you work at a daycare, it could still happen to you.

The picture on the left is me before I had learned any swear words, and on the right is after swear words. Knowing swear words makes you super tan.

World's shortest quest

My two favorite foods are probably carrots and eggs because I don’t have to buy a special version of them, no matter what kind you buy they never have gluten and so they won't ever kill me or even make me sick.

Some things are hard or impossible to make gluten free - mostly pastries and bagels, and some things would probably be easy but no one does it - like Pop Tarts and Cheerios. And then some things are so easy apparently, that there are tons of them. Like Oreos. 

There are at least a thousand (or three that I can think of) brands of gluten-free Oreos and all of them get incredible reviews. The incredible review is: “They taste just like Oreos.” 

Sometimes I buy them because I think there might be a brand I haven’t had yet that will taste just like Oreos, sometimes I think maybe my life is actually a quest to find a really great wheat-free chocolate sandwich cookie and I start to think about the songs they will write about me and so I buy a lot of different types of these Oreos and recently I realized some bad news, I don’t think it’s the rice or quinoa or potato or whatever weird flour they’re putting in that’s the problem. I think I might not like Oreos.

The best thing about Oreos, even gluten-free ones is you can take them apart and build your own real Double-Stuf® Oreos, and the best thing about being an adult is you can just throw your Double-Stuf® Oreo in the trash, no one is going to make you eat it. 

The best thing about being a rich adult is you can throw it in the garbage disposal.

Japanese werewolf book club

Reading more wasn’t even one of my New Year’s resolutions but I’ve already read a ton of books this year. One of them was called 1Q84. It's by Haruki Murakami who is not only a great author but a four-time winner of the "Best Name" award.

It’s 1157 pages long, but if you take out all the parts that are just very specific descriptions of healthy foods it’s a quick 200-pager. The characters in this book may be fictional, but the foods they eat are very real. These meals are simple, homemade, nutritions, and need to be carefully explained, I’m confident no one ate even a snack without the author telling me about it. Rice, pickled ginger, three slices of radish, a cup of tea, an apple, papaya.

But the non-food parts are an awesome story - scary and beautiful and there’s a ton of really weird sex. Really weird sex followed up by a light lunch of cucumber, shrimp, sesame oil, parsley, edamame, and little bit of green onion and lemon juice.

This book had so many great sentences. One of them goes something like “He looked at his eyes like he was seeing if a piece of furniture could fit in a room.” I’m not a professional writer, but I’ve convinced my employer that I am, and I think that’s a great sentence. Another one is "He drank some tomato juice from the fridge, boiled water, ground coffee beans and made coffee, toasted a slice of bread. He set the timer and cooked a soft-boiled egg." Oh wait, that’s another food description. What about "He made rice pilaf using ham and mushrooms and brown rice, and miso soup with tofu and wakame. He boiled cauliflower and flavored it with curry sauce he had prepared. He made a green bean and onion salad."

It's really hard to find sentences that aren't food descriptions.

Anyway, if you want to read a book and you have a sturdy suitcase or wheelbarrow to carry that book around in, you should read 1Q84. Even if it’s not your New Year’s Resolution, but especially if it is.

This is a picture to illustrate that I have two moons hanging in my apartment, which if you've read the book you would know is an insane coincidence. Can you see them? I think my sister has the best smile in the world and this isn't even a real smile.

I don't know Dennis Gilstad but he's also incredibly interested in food in 1Q84. You can see his diagrams of all the food in 1Q84 here, or if you know him he can probably show you in person. 

Useful information if you hate spiders

I hope you never need to know how to not freak out about thousands of spiders in your apartment, but just in case you do.

1. Pretend they’re pets

My landlord doesn’t allow pets but I’ve found a genius workaround, spider pets. “Spider pets, spider pets, spider pets” I repeat to myself over and over again while I watch them crawl around in the shower or climb from the middle of the floor to the ceiling suspended in midair. These loving little adorable animals are under my care. I am so lucky.

2. Kill them

This seems in direct opposition to the first technique but it works just as well: spraying large amounts of poison on them or smashing them with my Doc Martens.

3. Think about bugs I don’t have

Last summer was the Summer of Millipedes which, as catchy as it sounds, was so horrible. Now the spiders eat the millipedes. They feast on them really, one millipede is like a table’s worth of steak for these spiders. So, good thing I don’t have millipedes anymore?

4. Have nightmares scarier than them

Last week I had a dream that I lost my face in an accident, and found a free face in the mail, but it was my coworker's face and the surgery went really wrong. Good luck scaring me now, spiders.

Here are pictures of apartments without spiders, to break up the text and to remind me to be thankful that at least I don't have cats.