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Last week I said goodbye to my wonderful cat Lola. She was an unceasing fount of affection for close to 14 years, 13 spent with me. Everyone loved her, and she loved everyone, until her last year when she got significantly less sociable. She also got IBD, idiopathic cystitis, and who knows what else that made her stop using the litter box, piss blood, and spend most of her time sleeping on the floor. I miss her terribly. She was one of the greats.

Lola is survived by Momo, who is a couple years younger but also has IBD and ...

Good day everyone. I’ve had the good fortune to be published on the Her View from Home website again. It’s always thrilling to have your words published and gratitude fills my heart.

My story is about a visit we made to Oak Bay in Victoria, B.C. (If you’ve already read my story on Facebook, I apologize that you’re getting it again via my blog post.)

You can read my essay here.

I feel my time spent there was transformative, and I can’t wait to go back.

Take care. Thanks for reading.

Kim

Why I am returning to my regular dose of Prozac after 2 years of tapering off.

A few days ago, at a candy store in another town, I asked if I could buy some empty chocolate boxes. The co-owner came out and said no, “we’re a candy store, we want you to buy candy not boxes.” I gave her the 4 homemade saffron-cardamom chocolates I had brought for her — she tried one right there, saying “ooh, funky!” I assured her I was just needing a few boxes to give away my culinary experiments to friends ...

My furnace went out yesterday, the coldest of the year. A tech came and got it back on. 3 hours after he left it went out again. He’s coming back this morning, but I faced the night — coldest of the year, -3°F with windchill below -20° — with space heaters and a few open taps to keep the pipes from freezing and bursting, and multiple electric blankets for me and the cats. I was freezing and shaking when I went to bed at 1am; I awoke at 5:30 to cloying dry heat, because the furnace mysteriously ...

I spoke with Stephanie Winn of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist at the end of December. We got kinda deep and spiritual on the subject of cancellation and some other stuff.

The post Stephanie Winn Interview appeared first on Nina Paley.

I was so tired when we got home from the ranch last night, but it was the good kind of tired. My husband, brother and I made the 2.5 hour trip to the monument company to pick up the marker for my parents’ gravesite, then the one hour drive from there to the ranch to… Continue reading It Was a Good Day

Sometimes I miss food.

By food I mean Indian food, Thai food, Mexican food, salsa fresca, salads, pizza, pasta, and my homemade bread and soups: tomato, lentil-kale, vegetarian chili. Tortilla chips, potatoes with skins on, sesame seeds, nuts, herbs, and Numb Oil Tofu from Golden Harbour.

I miss eating with others. This genuinely lovely article by Brandon Showalter felt like a knife in my heart:

“Why have I been doing this, you ask? And how do I do it in light of such deep and profound differences among us? It’s actually not that complicated. As my past and present ...

Dave was hella funny and brilliantly creative and kinda nuts, with a good heart that just stopped January 11, 2024. We both had comic strips in the Daily Illini in the late 1980’s; his, “Bob ‘n’ Dave,” was clever, hilarious, gonzo, and unpretentiously deep. Much later, as the Duke of Uke, he made “Spider Suite” which I used in my film Seder-Masochism. His was the absolutely perfect voice of Death, and if there is an afterlife I hope he’s simultaneously entertaining and scaring the pants off any souls he meets.

The post Dave King Memorial Blogpost appeared first ...

A poem about connecting with my Ashkenazi heritage.

Today I am a woman.
Today I am a Jew.
Today I have an ailment
my ancestors all knew.

For many generations,
my Fathers’ guts have hurt.
My Mother can’t eat chocolate:
a most unjust dessert.

I gather all my chocolate;
I give it all away.
No more can I digest it,
And I have Crohn’s today.

I feel myself much older
than I have ever known.
Today I have a Crohn’s disease;
Today I am a crone.

The post Bat Mitzvah appeared first on Nina Paley.

Diagnosis: Crohn’s.
The Autoimmune Empire
has colon-ized me.

The post Crohn’s Haiku appeared first on Nina Paley.

My dad

Yes, I take after him :-) 

Daddy's Girl

He passed away in 1998 and I miss him everyday. The grief never really goes away. You try not to dwell upon it constantly. You eventually learn to think of happy memories when you think of them. 

One of my happy memories of my dad is when he would return from an out-of-town work trip.  In his shirt pocket, there would be a 5 Star candy bar .  As soon as we heard him or saw him at the door, we girls would run up to him ...

Grief is a fickle fiend. And totally unpredictable. We have all experienced the loss of a loved one at some point or another. Some a long time ago, and some very recent. There is a difference between mourning and grieving. Mourning is a time period after death, which is the expression of an experience, involving loss, causing grief, occurring as a result of someone’s death. Grief is the response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, grief also ...

I’m not feeling great.  I should probably just end this post right here.  But, no, I’ll soldier on. Not because this post is important, it’s not, but because it represents all the things on my to do list and so much that is just life. No one needs to hear my laundry list of “woes”, […]

Laughing with Mom – Photo by John Kelly “Have you dreamt about her?” This was a question a number of people asked after my mother died.  But I wasn’t.  I hadn’t.  In fact I couldn’t remember dreaming about anything or anyone, until this past week.  Maybe it was because it was the first Thanksgiving since she […]

So here’s the thing…  I feel a whole lot better when I show up even when I feel awful, even when I feel things are rough and I’m tired, even when I don’t want to.  I’ve also learned that showing up anyway is the single best remedy for not continuing to feel that way. Except […]

Stitch, put on the design wall, evaluate, consider, take down, add a new element, stitch, put back up on the design wall, take a photograph, consider, have an idea, take down, thread up a new color, take a chance, take a risk, take a breath, stitch and then the tears arrive.  Not a few drops […]

This blog is a reminder of my mother.  She was my biggest supporter and commented over the years more than anyone else. It was through this blog that I often kept in touch with her and towards the end it was the one full proof way I knew I could reach her, especially when my […]

There are moments that feel impossible and others that fly by unnoticed. Mostly I’m exhausted almost constantly, as though a perpetual scrim has enveloped me, making everything feel heavier, cloudier, more difficult to sort through. It’s not terrible, just different. This is grief, I’m told. This morning is one of those heavier moments. Maybe it’s […]