I’ve had a complicated relationship with my mother, as many children do. There were alot of problems, but the biggest one was that we’re too much alike. A surefire way to generate conflict is to put two smartasses together under the same roof, for years at a time, and under extraordinary amounts of stress. I…
As a general rule, I don’t like true stories. They are not well plotted and the characters tend to the boring side of things. I like it when the author takes liberties. But for this story, I’m going to stick to the truth. My birthday was last week, but I need to start a few…
Ever since I had a kid, I’ve considered writing about fatherhood. I never actually go through with it, though. Sure, I’ve written some things about my daughter, or about some parenting decisions I’ve made, but nothing about being a father. There’s a simple reason for that. Being a father is such a unique experience that…
In 2019, I joined a 12 stories in 12 months challenge. Each month we are given a prompt and a word count and we build our stories from there. This is my first story. The prompt was “no one can know” and the word count is 1500. I’m tempted to point out all the things…
This is something I wrote about the shutdown. I didn’t post it at the time because I was so annoyed with everything having to do with the shutdown that my own piece annoyed me. Now that the shutdown is over, at least temporarily, I figured I’d put it out there. I think the point still…
Before I start, I want to acknowledge Anne Peterson’s piece How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation and Tiana Clark’s piece This is What Black Burnout Feels Like. This essay isn’t exactly a response to those writers, but reading their works helped me to finally focus this essay, which I’ve tried to write many times with…
Being a parent is hard. You’re literally responsible for another human being’s survival, but that’s not all. You also have to help them become a person- teach them about sharing, fairness, following the rules and listening to elders. Then you have to balance that against encouraging them to pursue their individuality, protect themselves, ask for…
A couple of years ago, I wrote a bunch of posts about dealing with depression. It was somewhat uncomfortable, but at the time, I couldn’t write about anything else. I’ve been dealing with another depressive episode for the past four-ish months. Only this time, I couldn’t get myself to write about it. In the past…
View Post I usually listen to music when I’m writing. It helps me drown out what’s going on around me, and can help me get into the right mood depending on the subject I’m writing about. I listened to a lot of music while writing this essay. These are the ten songs I came back…
I know this won’t be of interest to anyone else, but I was curious about how our blog did in 2018. So, I spent some time looking at statistics. Since I put in the work, I figured I’d write a little something about it. Overall, I think we had a pretty good year. According to…
