I spent all weekend delightfully entertained & moved by Phil Christman’s How to Be Normal. From the essay “How to Be Midwestern”:

I think nothing has shadowed my development as a writer more than my failure to have an interesting childhood. Most of it I spent watching TV. My family was kind of poor, but our poverty was more of a chronic than acute condition. It was the kind of working-poor experience that leaves you with a pervasive sense of limitedness and an instinctive terror of bank tellers, but not the kind that, once survived, makes you sound badass and inspiring. As for adolescence, my main memory of it is a pervasive boredom and a sense that interesting things only happened elsewhere and to other people, that I was doomed forever to be entering rooms moments after someone had said something funny or cool, learning about a party on the following Monday, befriending a group of people only long after its best anecdotes—“Remember when we climbed on top of the middle school and the cops chased us?” “Remember when we tricked those freshmen into smoking parsley?”—were already long established.

Other essays include: “How to be a Man,” “How to be Cultured” (a very good consideration of taste, poptimism, education, and middlebrow culture), and “How to be Religious” (on synthesizing leftist political commitments with religion).