BLOG | Life
Don’t ever give me a time machine.
If time travel gets invented in the future, we’ll see evidence of it in the present.
Why, Sports?
Why do we do it when defeat feels so much worse than victory feels good?
Everyone on Slack is having more fun than me.
I really, really wish I were the kind of person who could use productivity tools the right way.
The Chances Of Being Born
I can’t believe anybody ever gives birth, or gets born.
When It’s Time To Whinny
The summer between my sophomore and junior years of college, I worked in a law firm for the first time. Hired as an entry-level file clerk at a corporate defense firm in downtown New Orleans, I possessed zero legal experience and didn’t even know what a file clerk does (I wouldn’t learn, either). So, for the first time in my life, I put on business-casual clothes and carried a leather laptop case (usually without a laptop… I just wanted something to hold) into a tall office building every day. There I’d sit, still and silent, seven-and-a-half hours a day, five days a week, hoping no one would ask me anything.
Escaping the Echo Chamber: Is It Worth It?
Winston Churchill is famously quoted as saying, “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.” He never actually said this, and it’s just one of many quotes attributed to Churchill that he didn’t say, but the sentiment is appealing and persists because it makes everyone feel good about themselves, no matter what they believe. Liberals can feel caring and youthful, conservatives can feel learned and wise.
‘Female’ is an adjective, not a noun.
The language we use matters, even if we don’t think it does.
Talking During the Movie or, Life Is Not Enough
When the lights at the Superdome abruptly went out Super Bowl Sunday and ten million people raced to Twitter to make their Bane jokes, I concluded that those 34 minutes of blackout were the greatest Twitter moments of my life. As joke after joke made me crack up, my dad kept asking, “What? What?” He doesn’t understand Twitter, Facebook, or generally any technological product of the past decade, so he attempted to make sense of it.
“Those are just people online, just saying stuff?” he asked.
What I Know About Self Help
On my many dabblings with self-help programs.
Stockholm Syndrome or, What I Know About Parenting
I’m not a parent, but I often playact as one to the two kids prominently involved in my life. I feel at this point it’s safe to say I’ve had at least a reasonable facsimile of the parental experience. For stretches at a time, anyway.
Milkshakes or, Why Being an Adult SUCKS
Nobody ever insists I finish my milkshake or I’m in big trouble, mister.
Boy, I have no faith in medicine
Like a child, I got some water in my ear. It wouldn’t come out. Then, a miracle happened: A doctor cured me!
Choices or, Why I Still Read the Newspaper
Once we started knowing what people wanted, we gave it to them, which is not good.
Defending Your Life
State of the Bat: Here are some things going on with me.
Charlie Sheen & The Bart Simpson Complex
An encounter with an electronic ticket kiosk, owning a smartphone, and viewing “Apocalypse Now” get me very close to answering all of life’s questions.
Life or, I Keep My Diploma Under the Toaster
Some people want to show their post-college lives as being exactly as fun and amazing as their college years. College years were the best, weren’t they? Why don’t we hear from people who, like me, hated college?
Maybe This Whole ‘Civilization’ Thing Wasn’t Such a Great Idea After All, vol. XIX
In which I call for less freedom in the Apple Store, take my 7-year-old sister to the movies, don’t know my audience, have the same idea others have had, later, and envy a dog.
And What’s So Stinking About It?
On being a poor person on a cold night in a warm city with inadequate heating and insomnia, plus thoughts on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, the presidency of Ullysses S. Grant, the Gorillaz, and more!