“What says love more than doing what your wife wants—especially when it means so much to her sense of cultural identity?“

“While a toaster, in itself, is a small thing, choosing one took a whole lot out of me.”

“After an awkward moment during which I had to ask the salesclerk to please pry my fingers off my debit card, I bought a sewing machine.”

“My obsession, this month, was to make an aesthetically pleasing, if useless, piece of cloth to lay on the kitchen table for a few weeks.”

“The number is no doubt arbitrary (brought to you by the same people who decreed that eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day were required for basic survival). “

“I wasn’t a poor loser without a working refrigerator; I was a cultured woman who demanded only the freshest food.”