About Me

She/her. They/them is cool too.

Capricorn sun / Scorpio rising / Sagittarius moon / ENFP / Enneagram 7w6.

This is for sure enough info to steal my identity.

Movie pitch:

A father hates his daughter’s chosen companion, Rodney. Through a series of hijinks, the father and Rodney build a true friendship. We’d cast Eddie Murphy as the father and Rodney would be played by Chris Rock. It’s important to note that Rodney is actually a hamster. Also, there is a brilliant appearance by the late Norm MacDonald, but he’s a dog.

Wouldn’t you want that movie to exist? Well good news, it does exist! That movie is Dr. Doolittle, and I will die on the hill that it’s one of the best movies of all time.

Garrett Graff, Pulitzer Prize finalist and former editor of Politico, was one of the speakers at a panel Q&A event I attended. I saw him standing off to the side after the panel ended, so I went over to introduce myself. I asked if he’d be willing to read the question I submitted as it hadn’t been selected by the event moderators, and he very generously agreed.

Here was the question:

“Hi Garrett. Like you, I am a writer. I haven't been nominated for a Pulitzer, but I recently finished working on a book about a pretty famous Tik Tok dog, so… any day now. Since we've been in the same room, could I put "mildly sort of endorsed by Garrett Graff" on my resume? If not, my question is: how dare you?”

He gave what appeared to be a genuine belly laugh and then said: “Oh man, yes. Absolutely you can, that’s great.”

We took a selfie to prove this happened, but I can't upload images to the drop-down thing. Could I go figure out the custom CSS required to do so? For sure. Thing is, it's a truly lovely day outside. I'm talkin' 77º, blue sky, light breeze, the whole deal. I gotta go bask.

It’s programmed into my Wisconsin-born DNA to watch every Packer game. It’s like how turtles somehow remember the exact spot they were born and instinctively return to that beach every fall to watch the Packers.

One of the great loves of my life is synchronized swimming. I'm aware that they officially changed the name of the sport to "Artistic Swimming," but that choice was very dumb, and I do not abide. I was a synchronized swimmer for almost a decade and have taken it upon myself to prepare a Google Slide presentation about why it's one of the hardest and coolest sports in the world.

Exactly zero people have requested to see it, but this is a rare subject where proselytizing is both appropriate and effective, so that will never stop me.

What I’ve liked so far this year:

• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

• [Essay] Concision: A Sprawl by George Estreich

• Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Top two anecdotes (abridged versions):

I went to a friend’s wedding in Romania and learned that nobody parties like Romanians. At 3am we were on the 4th of a 6-course dinner, and the bride’s grandmother told me I better have an espresso so I could keep up.

I spent the night in a decommissioned underground missile silo. Screaming into the empty 18-story missile shaft was as close to a religious experience as one can have in a temple built for 1,200 pounds of nuclear sacrilege. Like screaming at hell and hearing hell scream back.

While I have proofread everything, sometimes typos fall through the cracks. So here’s the deal: my venmo is @ellenmellen. If you find a typo, tell me where/what it is in the request and I’ll Venmo you $1.

This isn’t a scavenger hunt, by the way. I didn’t purposefully hide easter egg typos because I think it’s fun to venmo strangers money. I’m just saying if they exist, my valuation of the heads up is one dollar + a thank you.