Skip to content

Starshine Roshell Posts

Bliss by Pavement Pounding

Published on November 14, 2018

For two years, I’ve been suffering from a strange, specific feeling: I’m in a hole in the ground and steamy manure is being shoveled on top of me as I lie there holding my breath. 

I’d been counting on the midterm elections to offer sweet relief from this slow-death-by-dung sensation. But donating $10 to distant campaigns and sharing social media posts about voter rights weren’t helping me shake that feeling of being powerless over my own fate — of having to shut my eyes tight and just … acclimate to the aroma of excrement.

So when a friend asked if I would canvass door-to-door for a Democratic candidate in a tight congressional race two days before the election, I jumped at the chance to do something that might actually have an impact. I’ve never canvassed before, and in fact I loathe anyone coming to my door uninvited. But if I’ve learned anything since Election Day 2016, it’s that democracy is a full-contact sport. So I suited up in sunscreen and sneakers and got out the gosh-dang vote. 

Continue readingBliss by Pavement Pounding

Camping Sucks; There, I Said It

Published on August 22, 2018

Done Apologizing for Detesting the Great Outdoors

I’m sitting 5,400 feet high in the Sierra Nevada mountains at the edge of a glassy lake that’s rimmed with fluffy pines pointing emphatically at the sky. I’m keenly aware that I’m supposed to feel blissish and perspectivey. But my legs brandish 13 bug bites of various dimensions and shades, there is dirt in my nostrils, and I’m dreading another torturous night on a foam pad punctuated by the random swish-swish of my son flopping around in his nylon sleeping bag.

I loathe camping, and I’m sorry about that. I really am. I’m comfy admitting that I hate other things I’m supposed to like: Green drinks. Michael Moore. Black Mirror. When you say you detest camping, though, people look at you like you’re broken, like you’re missing a crucial piece (the way your tent always is).

Continue readingCamping Sucks; There, I Said It

One Space. Period.

Published on June 2, 2018

Foes of Formatting Want Us to Take Double-Spaced Step Backward

For months on end, I’ve been watching in shock as seemingly impossible things keep happening: The most innovative nation on the globe elected an actual imbecile. Hooded Klansmen marched proudly in our streets. Regulations aimed at slowing our environmental doom were casually reversed.

Now researchers are making a scientific case for using two spaces between sentences in typed communication, instead of one. Two profligate, puffy spaces. Instead of just the sensible single space.

And this, my friends, is where my head explodes. This is where I say, By god, you animals, no more. No more will I stand idly by and watch barbarous, maniac-manned bulldozers ram at the pillars of our human progress. Feh, ye foes of formatting! We have come too far from the clomping Smith Corona Sterling and the humming, ham-fisted IBM Selectric dumping unsightly utilitarian gaps in the midst of our otherwise pretty paragraphs, to ever — nay, ever! — go back.

Continue readingOne Space. Period.

A Requiem for Trolls Gone By

Published on June 2, 2018

I’m Nostalgic for Nasty Online Commenters

For a decade, they plagued me. Called me bitch, boob, bigot. Speculated about my weight and marriage. Pronounced my children morons. They spewed countless frothy phrases at me from the online comment section at the end of my columns.

Now they’re gone.

In February, the Santa Barbara Independent joined the growing crowd of news sites shutting down their online comments. Reuters, CNN, Bloomberg, NPR, NBC News, the Chicago Sun-Times — the websites of media companies are slamming their windows on the fast-flying fingers of the fractious fruitcakes who spend their days anonymously picking fights with writers, public figures … and, well, mostly with other fractious fruitcakes.

Continue readingA Requiem for Trolls Gone By

The Call of Target’s Toilets

Published on June 2, 2018

Do You Know About The Bull’s-Eye’s Bathroom Phenomenon?

A dozen years ago, despondent at the dearth of a Target in our town, I scrawled out a joke petition to bring the all-providing Bull’s Eye to Santa Barbara and emailed it to friends. Just for cackles ’n’ snorts. Turns out the entreaty expressed a longing that was shared deeply — and widely. Friends sent it to friends, and within a few weeks it had amassed thousands of local residents’ signatures, including the mayor’s.
For years after, developers tried in vain to bring a Target to town. This year, at long last, we finally get one! Well, we get a quarter of a normal-sized Target. Locals are all asplutter over the traffic and parking snarls they’re sure the store will spawn. And those of us who make pilgrimages to our merchant mecca in neighboring counties wonder how a 32,000-square-foot retail space can hold all of the throw pillows, jaunty Panama hats, diabolically soft jammies, decorative storage solutions, pink kettlebells, Boho goblets, chunky espadrille wedges, and Soap & Glory face masks with which a modern woman likes to deliriously overstuff her red shopping cart. How, I ask you!?
Even so, there’s another important issue that’s being overlooked as we ponder our new Target, and I want to call developers’ attention to it before construction begins: the bathrooms.

Continue readingThe Call of Target’s Toilets

Raising a First-Person Shooter

Published on April 7, 2018

‘Fortnite’ Video Game Blowing Holes in My Anti-Gun Policy

The hypocrisy of my life is corroding my insides, and confession is the only cure. Outwardly — in dinner conversations, on social media, at girls’ nights — I go all frothy-mouthed about gun control, all soapbox-y on the nefarious NRA, all high-horsey over our nation’s sick obsession with firearms.
But in a dimly lit corner of my home, probably even as you read this, my sweet 12-year-old son who still orders off the kids’ menu is entertaining himself by assassinating animated strangers with a digital assault rifle — the very weapon now dominating public debate.

Continue readingRaising a First-Person Shooter

Theater Kids Save the World

Published on April 7, 2018

Drama Class Prepares Students to Lead a Revolution

Everyone who’s been to high school knows it: Jocks top the student hierarchy. They earn the yearbook’s Most Popular designations and dictate, by their mere arrival, where the coolest after-prom parties are.
But when a group of outspoken, articulate, enraged students galvanized the nation after last month’s massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, it wasn’t a pack of athletes. It was a ragtag troupe of theater kids.

Continue readingTheater Kids Save the World

Speaking with the Enemy?

Published on March 10, 2018

Chatting Up Christian Gun Owners ‘The Benham Bros.’

So this week I reached out to a pair of Jesus-preaching, evolution-denying, gun-owning abortion opponents to see if we could find common ground. And guess what? We’re precisely as different as we think.

Continue readingSpeaking with the Enemy?

Rooting Against Your Kids

Published on March 10, 2018

Yes, Sometimes We Do Want Them to Fail

There’s tough-love parenting, and then there’s just “tough luck, kid!” Wisconsin GOPSenate candidate Kevin Nicholson got a heaping helping of the latter last week when his Democrat parents each donated $2,700 — the maximum amount allowed by law — to support his opponent’s campaign. Which is bound to make Easter dinner exceptionally awkward.
But it got me thinking about the times I’ve rooted against my own kids, and whether it was the right thing to do. Since, you know, they’re not even Republicans.

Continue readingRooting Against Your Kids
Content Copyright © 2026 Starshine Roshell