A List of Things to Get Me Through this Day
- The Oxford Comma
- People who don’t like the Oxford Comma, and how those who do are willing to march into righteous battle to defend it, the honor of grammar, and the very fate of the world swaying like grass grown inches longer upon the laurels of summer sunbathing.
- Vampire Weekend’s “Oxford Comma”
- Moments when thoughts extrude from the brain in such organic stroke of wonderfulness, like beautiful pipettes from a pastry bag in the backroom of a French patisserie. Just because no one else sees the magic does not mean it is without worth of beholding.
- All the cans of V8 I could’ve had
- That one time when T and I went to the Sendai Aquarium, and we were the oldest ones to meander the halls of watery depths, and I think we still had the most fun. Some of the littlest kiddos could tell just by looking at the fish which ones typically appeared on their dinner plates, and we smirked to ourselves while playing imperfect translators, the most keenly feigned ignorance when we were in need of another inside joke.
- The backsplash above the stovetop that aspires to be a Jackson Pollock painting with each new recipe muddled through, each saucepan left unattended and unlidded on medium-high for too long
- Caterpillars that play dead when you try to coax them to crawl onto your hand and their naively brave brothers and sisters who know you to be a friendly, warm-blooded twig and hike on up to keep looking for more greens to munch on, to fill their bottomless bellies
- Marble cake and the mystery of getting that perfect swirl immortalized in the interior
- When it was enough to just sit beside friends on back-aching hillsides and watch the sun go down, then come up again.
- The locusts in the trees, their buzz-sawing vocals proclaiming time still of two left feet.
Korellia Schneider is a graduate student and writer living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her work is forthcoming in the Write to Move anthology.
