Plain Catie

This weekend I buried my pet potato. Hairy Potater came to me as a gift from my brother-in-law, Parker, who, when scrambling to make me something for Christmas, asked my sister Abi what I wanted. Abi called me. "I don't know," I said, predictably indecisive. "I'd be happy with anything. I'd be happy with...a potato that looks like Harry Potter." Well. Happy Christmas, Hairy. I am sure that Park did not expect me to like the present, much less keep him. Much much less take him on field trips around Boston. Hairy visited me at school. He loved the Boston Public Library: "It's like magic." We even went to Harvard, which he kept pronouncing "Harvwarts." Hairy was my quarantine buddy. We went on walks together and sometimes he sat by my computer while I worked. We met squirrels and enjoyed a snowy, empty Boston. But alas, all things must go the way of the earth, most especially potatoes. My roommates kept asking when I was going to bur

It has a 36% on Rotten Tomatoes. It stars Anne Hathaway sporting the least-believable northern English accent. My roommate who “loves terrible movies” won’t even watch it with me. But the first time my best friend Bronwen showed it to me, snuggled up in my parent’s basement in the marshy anxiety of post-college life, I felt something shift. And at least once a year, when life gets dark—I move across the country, my dear friend and roommate moves away, there’s a global pandemic—I find myself curled up in my bed, crying and laughing at this awful, predictable, brilliant narrative of the deep pain and joy of life. (Also, I would be lying if I said my aesthetic wasn't based on Anne Hathaway's character's curly bangs and Docs.) The movie, One Day , follows twenty-three years in the lives of best friends Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, dropping in on them the same day every year—July 15 th —from their college graduation in 1988 to “present day” 2011. Romantic tension builds t