I love to travel, try new foods, ingest caffeine, and watch political news coverage. A psychologist by training trying to bring a little common sense to it all.
Sometimes I wish you could see my pain. Not in a dramatic Victorian-novel way. I am not fainting on a chaise lounge with a lace handkerchief. No violins are playing. Just see it. But you can’t. Because apparently I am a Barbie doll. Not the original one from […]
The other day I had a small, suspicious thought. What if some of us are a little bit addicted to sadness? Not the catastrophic kind.Not the kind that requires medical intervention and casseroles. I mean the specific, curated sadness many of us seem to carry around like a […]
Every morningthe birds begin their meetingbefore I do. They chirp with an enthusiasmthat feels slightly unnecessaryfor 6:07 a.m. Outside my windowthey are holding some sort of conferenceabout joy. I listen. But the strange thing isI knowthey are not singing to me. They are singing to a lifehappening somewhere […]
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope recently spotted something about 300 million light-years away that feels oddly familiar to modern humans: a galaxy that is mostly invisible, a little mysterious, and apparently made almost entirely of Dark Matter. In other words, a cosmic entity that is technically there, […]
While taking a break from spring cleaning (by which I mean sitting on the floor in a light existential spiral surrounded by piles labeled keep, donate, and why do I own this), I happened to look up at my living room wall. Not glance. Look. And there it […]
I recently watched Triangle of Sadness, which is not my usual cinematic comfort zone. I prefer my movies with a touch more joy and a touch less existential nausea. But this one? This one stuck. It’s satire with a scalpel slicing into beauty, wealth, class, and the elaborate […]
I read A Confederacy of Dunces years ago and thought it was hilarious. Now I think it’s prophetic. Back then, Ignatius J. Reilly felt like an exaggerated character. He is a pompous, self-righteous, overeducated man ranting about society’s collapse while blaming his digestive system for everything. Today he […]
There is a small monkey in Japan who briefly broke the internet because he coped with loneliness the way many of us secretly do: he found something soft and held on tight. Punch, a young monkey at Ichikawa Zoo, was spotted clinging to a plush toy for comfort […]
There are people who cry at weddings. People who cry at movies. People who cry at tax season. I cry at dog stories. A heroic dog.A rescued dog.A dog reunited with its human.A dog wearing a tiny raincoat. I am emotionally available for all of it. So when […]
What advice would you give to your teenage self? If I could sit across from my teenage self (probably on a twin bed with mismatched sheets, dramatic sighs, and a notebook full of Very Important Feelings) I wouldn’t tell her to change who she was. I liked her.She […]
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