Hold on Eva! OK sure, there are some great pieces on your list of top-ten Pyragraph posts. BUT. You’ve overlooked some of my bestest favorites!

Here’s my totally biased, not-in-alphebetical-order list of my fave superfab Pyragraph blog posts from the past year (and counting). Happy birthday to us!

1. First, let’s talk about Rennie Sparks, the loveliest member of one of my favorite bands, The Handsome Family (whose music was recently selected as the theme for a fancy HBO series). Almost exactly a year ago she wrote a great piece, Do It Anyway, about how you can get something out of even the shittiest of shitty shows you play as a musician, so you should just Do. It. Anyway. I am giving you an assignment: READ ALL OF RENNIE’S PIECES. There are only four of them (we are itching for more) and you won’t regret it.

2. And there’s Burlesque Medicine: Healing Body Issues & Empowering Women written by the “pure renegade actress, danger artist, and raw vegan chaote” Tonya Kay. This is a thought-provoking piece that I really enjoyed reading. Then a couple months later, it resurfaced as the starting point for Pyragraph’s first-ever-all-out-balls-to-the-walls-pedal-to-the-metal-type-until-your-fingers-bleed comment war! And what’s all the fuss about? Women’s bodies, and how they should use them. Check it out.

3. Crazybusy crazymotivated crazyproductive soapmaker Danielle Vincent also writes great pieces, which I’ve mentioned here. This time, though, I’d like to point you specifically to this piece, A Country Girl in Oakland, in which she talks about making the life for herself that she truly wants. Does she like dealing with fucking LA traffic? No. Would she really just like to live in a cabin in the mountains? Yes. Can I empathize with this? Yesh, yeshh I can.

4. And dear Shenandoah Davis! Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing this lovely piece on How To Book A Tour. As a musician who has never, ever toured and who could only imagine booking a tour as looking a lot like sitting in front of a laptop and sending out a flurry of emails, Facebook updates, and tweets, I am so grateful to have an outline, a sense of structure, a plan for making a tour actually happen successfully so I can finally (one day, when I work up the courage to actually get the fuck out there) can do it myself.

5. Ah, Tabatha Shaun! How I began to envy your life once I learned in this blog post, Don’t Let Side Jobs Bring You Down, that it involves acting and making shoes for tiny humans! This is such a great piece about choosing side jobs that don’t make you hurl. That just sometimes means that you just need to start your own baby-shoe-making business.

6. This, this here, Don’t Just Do Something—Sit There! is maybe both the shortest and my most favoritest Pyragraph post ever. Thank you, Jeff Nitzberg, for the humor, the insight, and the toilet talk.

7. Did I already use the superlative “most favoritest”? I meant to save that for this piece, How Le Chat Lunatique Ended Up in Kazakhstan, written by my sweetie, duomate, and domestic partner Jared Putnam (of filthy mangy gypsy jazz group Le Chat Lunatique, and uh, oh yeah, Sage and Jared’s Happy Gland Band). Yes indeed, those filthy mangy cats made it to Kazakhstan and this post tells you how it all went down. Including, among other things, a story about a rogue bottle of fermented camel’s milk.

There you have it! I think I’ve done the best I could to cover at least some of the great stuff that you so grievously overlooked, dear Eva!

Photo credits are included in the original posts.