Exit Strategies for Small Talk Hell

The next time you feel dread rise within you after someone asks what you’ve been ~up to~ these days, here are some responses that will help you hide the fact that you’ve mostly been hanging out with old pizza and burning through entire seasons of Unsolved Mysteries on your couch — or slowly building an insectoid army.

So: What have you been up to lately????

Some suggestions:

  • Taking photos of my enemies to trap their souls in a flimsy reel of film
  • Turning into bees
  • Fighting evil by daylight, winning love by moonlight; same as ever; you know me
  • Working to figure out how to stop repeating this day over and over again
  • Living a lie
  • Developing a lifestyle brand centered around turning into bees
  • Playing one single game of Risk
  • Training three children in an overcoat to impersonate me
  • Inheriting a wealthy space kingdom, hooking up with my angel-winged-werewolf bodyguard and selling my eggs to buy a telescope, but not really in that order
  • Epilating
  • Consuming organic matter, chewing it with the bony protrusions growing in my mouth and digesting it with my human stomach, rather than sucking nutrients into my body via a proboscis. And job hunting!!!
  • Aging in reverse
  • Playing Stardew Valley for 800 hours; I am both figuratively and literally dying; please send help
  • Modeling and learning about science (not bees)
  • Collecting fidget spinners; like, is that A Thing Now or what?
  • Shouting NOT GREAT, BOB at anyone who makes eye contact with me
  • Repopulating
  • Paying off my student loans and revitalizing the dryer sheet industry
  • Sleeping beneath an aged oak for one hundred years and growing this tremendous beard; say, my good lad, what year is it?
  • not beesssszzz
CC Calanthe

CC Calanthe

If you prick your finger and write “Cat Fancy” on your mirror during a harvest moon, CC will appear behind you and make you put human clothes on your pets. CC is Head Crone in Charge at POMEgranate Magazine, as well as the co-host of Moon Podcast Power MAKE UP!!
A collage featuring the top 10 crones of the year for 2023.

Crones of the Year 2023

As we spiral ever further towards certain catastrophe on this interminable mortal coil, there are some lights of hope that pass fleetingly by. Most often: the crones or otherwise eternal baddies found in all of our favorite escapist media. And so we present our top ten 2023 Crones of the Year.

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POMEgranate Magazine