I wasn’t the first person to arrive at the IOP this morning. I was second. It threw me off. Second. I didn’t win. I got there about the same time I always do. It’s just that someone else was earlier. So disconcerting. My check-in was fine. I was very tired again, which is kind of…
Last December, I made a post a day for the month. I decided to try it again this year. And the good news is that Jamil is going to try to join me. I’m not as confident this year as I was last year. Last year we had a new Star Wars movie to generate…
I have been an avid, some might say obsessive, music fan for as long as I can remember. As a result, I have a much bigger collection of music than anyone with as little money as I have had should have. Recently, I decided to start cataloging my collection. It’s in pretty rough shape after…
Yesterday, I went to see my daughter perform in The Nutcracker. The past few years I have brought her to watch The Nutcracker, but this year she got to be onstage. She was a reindeer, a trumpet playing angel and a bon-bon. Technically she wasn’t the star of the show, but why get hung up…
There’s this common occurrence where headlines have nothing whatsoever to do with the articles that they top. I’m fascinated by it. There are many ways to write badly but having a severely misleading title should be number one. Normally it is the case where the editor puts their own title on something, often without the…
Nihilism is the idea that life is meaningless. In popular thought, a nihilist is usually a person who does not believe in any higher power, no afterlife. You live and then you die and that’s it. People just naturally assume that nihilism is a pessimistic view. But why does it have to be pessimistic? Life…
The Supreme Court ruled that gay couples can marry in all 50 states. I don’t talk all that much about gay rights. I’m a strong supporter of gay rights, it’s just that I don’t feel like I have much to say about it. It is so unbelievably obvious that all human beings, regardless of orientation,…
My girlfriend told me a story about a guy she went to college with. This young man was a typical student at her school- a white male who came from alot of money. He was rude and dismissive, and engaged in explicit racism and sexism on a constant basis. He called her a nigger during their…
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…
In Connecticut, where I think most of my readers are, the primaries are this Tuesday. Every time an election is coming up, I like to remind everyone to vote. I know that’s a tall order for a midterm primary, but I want to urge every eligible voter to go out this Tuesday and vote. The…
