The ever-talented Sarah Hepola on my life.

The man in front of the beer display has his arms folded in front of him, genie style, forearms parallel with the floor. He mumbles something, and then gives a hard blink and a quick nod at the beer. It’s an eerily familiar “I Dream of Jeannie” imitation. At first I think he must be joking around with a friend, but when I look behind me I realize we’re the only two in the aisle. That guy really wants some beer.

In other news, did you know they make fat-free half-and-half now? How does it still count as half-and-half if there’s no fat in it? I mean, the whole point of half-and-half is to reduce your yummy heavy-cream intake (by half) without losing the yummy heavy cream entirely. If you take away the cream, what the hell is the other half? I have been thinking about this since yesterday.

So Bryan used to be an actor, which means that every once in awhile I find myself doing odd things, like spending the day being a reader for a regional theater company. A reader sits in a chair and reads the lines between the lines that the real actor needs to say.

Real actor: I have always been mad for you, Bernadette.

Reader: And-I-you-Johnny.

Real actor: Marry me!

Reader: I-couldn’t-possibly. You-know-how-daddy-feels.

And so on. Today I watched many talented actors audition for many roles. I learned that when the stage direction says to express frustration, one should not necessarily hurl oneself prone on the floor and wham at the stage with one’s fists. If one does that, it is unlikely one will receive a callback.

My favorite part of a Vogue article by Katrina Heron, former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. She quit her hectic job to be a better mom and find a more varied life:

“The joys of a carefree life eluded me. I’d sit down with a book and not be able to read it. I was distracted, all peripheral vision. I felt I should be accomplishing something.

Thank God for kids, who really do teach us to delight in slow pleasures. We would dawdle over breakfast, talking about how much we liked raisins.”

The back of this girl’s car is elaborate. She has a few bobble-head dolls in the back window: a puma, a devil, a girl on a surfboard, a Barbie doll. The bumper is covered with stickers: “I live with FEAR every day., Princess, Bitch, Kill ‘em all!, Girls gone wild!, I don’t live with insanity, I embrace it!” Above, the dolls nod-nod-nod, as if they couldn’t agree more, as though they were about to say so themselves.