On digital heirlooms and ongoing conversations — A recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Family Heirlooms That Our Children Don’t Want,” apparently resonated with millennials, as many of my peers were sharing it on social media. The gist is that boomer parents have a lot of stuff, and often, for various reasons, their adult children don’t want…

Work-study was my way to a college education. But was spending time on a useless, low-paid job really worth it? — Ask someone about the worst job they ever had and you’re likely in for a story. A babysitting gig from hell. A Steinbeck-esque tale about toiling in a fish-canning factory. Workplace bullying. Sexual harassment. Safety violations. Unreasonable demands. Unpaid overtime. I’ve had some bad jobs, but to be honest, I’m…

Reckoning with adult orphanhood, ghosts, and the stranger who spoke at my mom’s funeral as if she knew her — Sometimes, death is sudden. It jumps out at you like a mugger in a dark alley. Blackout. The next thing you know, you’re awake, alive, at your mother’s funeral, in harsh daylight, and a stranger, a pretty young hippie woman coming down from a mushroom trip, is standing up, telling…

But they can remind us of who we might become — Our jobs don’t define who we are, not really. We all know that. We’ve read the tweets, laughed at the memes. And yet, here we remain. Asking people what they do. Including details about our professions in our online bios. Defining ourselves and others by what’s printed on our payslips…

Five vital lessons I learned along the way — Many writers and creatives are obsessed with time travel. The potential of going back and making different choices naturally appeals to our imaginations and our very way of working. In a sense, we write in time machines — we can always scroll up in a document or flip back a…

How a year of eating at home has ended my lifelong love affair — The other day, I was sitting on my couch, minding my own sweat-pant-wearing business, when an email landed in my inbox. An update from a blog I subscribe to. A new recipe for a kale and shaved brussels sprout salad. Upon opening this email, a painful malaise struck me, like…

Dogs offer so much more than just companionship — Dogs make great companions — that much we all know. When a dog comes into your life, you gain a loyal friend, a pal to keep your loneliness at bay, which has been particularly relevant in this era of social distancing. You have someone to talk to in silly voices…

Sometimes, being a writer means letting go of your goals — We hear it incessantly: We’re living in unprecedented times. Something we hear just as often but talk about a lot less is this: We’re all under constant pressure to use this unprecedented time. Everyone, it seems, has been taking up hobbies, baking banana bread, nurturing houseplants and sourdough starters, developing…

It’s easy to follow health guidelines, but it’s much harder to look away — Once upon a time, social media was a way to connect with people we knew — Classmates.com, Myspace, Facebook. Then it was a way to connect with people we wanted to know and who hopefully wanted to know us — Twitter, Tinder, LinkedIn. Now, it’s voyeuristic, a place for us…