I am surrounded by boxes of memories, furniture, and china that have never really belonged to me. I am the caretaker for what I salvaged from my inheritance, and it feels a lot like living inside of a storage unit. As I embark on a major re-organization of my studio...
Sometimes personal reinvention is less about appearances and more about finding out where our True North moved to. I'm an atheist so it might seem surprising that one of my favorite authors is the Catholic monk, Thomas Merton. There are a lot of reasons to love his...
That's where I am right now. I have been on a long daily streak of writing blog posts on my own blog and cross posting to Medium. That streak came to a crashing halt during finals week at Florida State University when I and my colleagues had to drop everything to...
Between my own sense of panic and the culture I grew up in, I have no clear concept of what "accomplishment" looks like. Meaning: when is enough, enough? When can you reach the point of the day and say, "I have done what I needed to do"? I'm not sure I've ever reached...
It was 1999 when I decided to trash my credit score. I did not have any particularly nefarious plans, honestly, but I owed a few thousand dollars to a couple of credit card companies and it felt insurmountable, given me and my husband's low-wage jobs. The companies...
[tl;dr - do one activist thing a day, such as make a phone call, and you too can save the world!!!!] There is a lot of frustration right now around the sense of helplessness that liberals and progressives are feeling, stemming out of a general consensus that we,...
Keely has bad teeth, but she has three less now. [warning: talking about dental/tooth damage] So, the plan was for the vet to extract ONE tooth. Unfortunately when they got a good look, they found a mess. They ended up pulling two pre-molars, which led to one of her...
I'm not known for taking risks. I am, in fact, absurdly risk-averse, so much so that my therapist is really over it. I have already written about pissing off my therapist, and that she is demanding that I take some risks. Oh, she didn't put it that way -- her words...
My dearest Keely is still unfurling her personality for me. She's been my companion for just over two months now and I think she realizes that she's here to stay. She's barking more, for one thing. Not a lot, usually when there is a loud noise outside she doesn't...