There seems to be a crop of youngish (early 30s or so) chicks out there who are busy being all domestic-like. They thrive on knitting brightly-colored caps and employing old-fashioned rolling pins and retro cherry-print aprons in kitchens outfitted with enameled colanders and stainless steel toasters. They bake whimsically-named cookies and cupcakes for both no reason and all occasions, with butter churned on their own organic farms, where their husbands bring them gourmet breakfast in a bed covered by a homemade quilt while wearing vintage pajamas they found in an old trunk in the attic of their house.

As I scan through lavishly-worded accounts of their daily routines, pausing occasionally to admire their hand-embroidered napkins, I confess I'm somewhat daunted. Why can’t I, too, refinish that scuffed old vanity I found on the Vermont roadside and replace its missing drawer pulls with antique varieties found at the flea market that my husband and I drive to every Sunday in our slightly dusty red pick-up truck? Why can’t I listen to Billie Holiday while baking biscotti made with flour I ground just that morning and currants I plucked from wherever the fuck currants come from?

Why don’t I make myself a necklace out of seashells and marbles and fingernail clippings and braid my hair into two thick long braids that I'll wear over the front of my shoulders and prance around in a meadow barefoot and toe-ringed, and write non-rhyming long-winded poetry that I'll present to my boyfriend on our wedding day, hand-printed with ink created from a blend of my own breast milk, menstrual blood, and tears on handmade paper and sealed with wax lovingly made by the bees I keep in my barn? Why?

Because I'm not that kind of girl. Thank god.