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…
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…
My daughter is having her second sleepover of her winter break. A couple of days ago, she hosted. Tonight she’s staying at a friend’s. I don’t know how it is for other parents, but I find hosting a sleepover to be a lot of work. I feel a lot of pressure to make sure they…
It is a pleasure giving my daughter gifts. She gets visibly excited, really, genuinely excited. It doesn’t even matter that much what the gift is. She’s as happy with clothes as she is with toys or crafts or books. It makes Christmas morning a real treat. This was a somewhat challenging year for me and…
I’ll admit this right off the bat: I stole the title for this essay from a dating profile on Plenty of Fish. I don’t remember what the young woman looked like, but I’ll take her at her word that she was in fact fine in the summertime, and possibly in the fall and winter as…
Charles Dickens wrote a piece called “A Christmas Tree” as a magazine article. In it, he describes a gathering of people admiring a Christmas tree. Then he goes on to describe all the memories that get triggered by the sight. He remembers childhood toys, food, and ghost stories among other things. Until this year, the…
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is less than a week away. A few copies have been leaked, and Twitter has been littered with players sharing combos, insights and predictions about the competitive aspect of the game. I’ve been playing Smash competitively since 2004, so I’m extremely interested in getting as much information as I can. But…
There’s something about palindromes that I enjoy. I don’t think there’s anything unique about that. People seem to generally like symmetry, patterns and repetition. 33 is a short palindrome, not like race car, but there’s even something appreciable in its simplicity. It also happens to be the age that I’ll be in two weeks. Palindrome…
Today is my son’s 11th birthday. I celebrated by looking up whether life insurance policies pay out in the case of suicide. I cried silently in the back seat on the ride into work this morning, but thought to myself, “Hold it together for now. You have to walk past the Bushnell to get to…
On the morning of March 14, 2018, students all over the country participated in a school walkout to protest gun violence and to honor the seventeen children killed in Parkland, FL. In a lot of ways, this was inspiring, seeing thousands of kids believe in a cause and actually try to do something about it….
