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 not even sure my worst job qualifies as a job since I didn’t get paid. In the most generous terms, I bartered my time for passage into higher education. In the harshest terms, you might call it indentured servitude.
College was sold to millennials as a necessity — the operative…
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 the stuff. This dilemma raises some complex emotions for boomers, but ultimately, many of them come around to realize that millennials already have their own stuff, and what’s deemed valuable or important to one generation isn’t necessarily viewed as important or valuable to the next.
When my parents died five…
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. We know better, and yet.
The other day, my British father-in-law told me that when he graduated from teacher’s college, he immediately landed his dream job at a fancy school near his hometown in the north of England. He was told that if he performed well, the job could be…
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 few pages in our notebooks and completely change how a scene plays out. As creators of worlds, we possess limitless choices, and we get to experiment with the consequences without any real consequences. It’s all play. Nothing is set in stone until we’re happy with it. We reign supreme.
While…
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 a gut punch. I groaned aloud. My concerned husband shouted from upstairs, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Nothing.” But inside, I was thinking: Spare me. Spare me your stupid sprouts.
To be clear, it wasn’t actually the sprouts or the kale that bothered me. Those foods are fine. In normal times…
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 and someone to talk about with your partner or friends. But dogs bring other benefits too.
I was lucky enough to call my dog Harpo family long before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19. However, he didn’t come to me under particularly fortunate circumstances. My parents, empty nesters in their…
Express Yourself
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 and fine-tuning complex skin care routines. Time is a gift, and who are we to waste it?
By all accounts, this past year should’ve been a boom time for creatives. While we were once expected to pick out outfits and commute and dine in restaurants and attend friends’ gigs and…
Are we finally ready to stop worshipping at her altar?
Once upon a time in teen America, you had to be white, slim, and pretty to be popular. You had to be sexually desirable. You had to dress well. The boys had to want you; the girls had to want to be you. It certainly helped if you came from a well-off family, although there was a certain allure to being gorgeous and from the wrong side of the tracks. Maybe you were “easier.” A little more desperate. …
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 to peer into enviable lives — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. We still want to know these people, but these people don’t even know we exist. They’re personalities, and we’re just numbers.
Much has already been written online about friendships and values and pandemic-era behavior and how they will affect our relationships…
This Is Us
On the twee language of pregnancy and motherhood
Like many areas of life, pregnancy has its own jargon. In corporate America, we think outside the box. In the tech world, we’re all about seamless integration. In pregnancy, we inquire about Baby. Not the baby. Not your baby. Just Baby, like this is Dirty Dancing. We might ask who else is preggers, or if there are any other preggos in the house. We request bump pics. We provide encouragement with Mama, you got this!
It’s embarrassing to admit, but one of the things that always put me off the idea of becoming pregnant was the language. I felt the…
