Back in D.C. after fourteen years, I felt bracketed on one end by the visceral memory of the first time I felt, with the fullest force, how much motherhood could compel me to behave in ways unforeseen and uninvited by my previous self, and on the other by a decade-and-a-half of living with and for two humans I had created inside me.

Are you real? Well, yes. Is it raining outside now? ...I'm in a basement.

*

The Dali show, from seven years ago, I missed. Can I still go now?

*

Who replaces your American flags? May I speak with them? URGENT.

*

  We close at five. If I arrive at five, when would I need to leave? Five.

*

I found a Miro in my attic. Can you buy…

Previously by Sophia Dembling: Red Cloud, Nebraska: A Literary Pilgrimage to Willa Cather Country The Pro Football Hall of Fame and the First Ladies National Historic Site are both located in Canton, Ohio. Can you guess which one is 118,000 square feet of million-dollar interactive razzle-dazzle, and which one…isn't? In researching my book, 100 Places in the USA Every Woman Should Go, I visited many sites focused on women's history. And while they were all fascinating…

Karen Yuan's previous work for The Toast can be found here.

In the last decade of his life, Henri Matisse couldn’t paint anymore. He sat post-surgery in a wheelchair in France’s Hôtel Régina, often barefoot and wearing a blue cardigan with no shirt beneath.

"Heaven knows, it's got to be this time."

-- New Order, "Ceremony."

Mercifully, The Punk Archive in Washington, DC is not the kind of multi-million-dollar so-called punk fashion show that once blighted the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the spring of 2013. It’s librarians. It’s old show posters. It’s an all caps announcement of “IF YOUR DC BAND WOULD LIKE TO PLAY PLEASE

…

I'm not usually in the business of telling you not to do things. Follow your dreams, put babies on spikes, whatever. We're only here on this planet for so long, there is no God, all is permitted. We make all this stuff up, you know? Human freedom, duty, etc. None of it is real. We're just trying to paper over the cavernous void that waits for us all. Do not take cell phone pictures of…