Being a Capricorn (generally those born around December 21-January 20) around the winter holidays is weird because for many, if not most of us, there is a lot of baggage around celebrations, birthdays, and presents. My birthday is December 28 and I grew up in a family that celebrated Christmas. I ve always had pretty contradictory [ ]
After maintaining a total stance of public silence for months, I recently publicly announced my unexpected divorce on Instagram. I shared a picture of the divorce cake that my friends got for me, and shared a brief essay I had drafted the day before about the news. I had to edit it down slightly from [ ]
Learning how to ask a busy person for something is a skill that few people are taught. It encompasses a range of personal and business etiquette skills. I am a busy person who often has to ask other busy people for things. Busy people ask me for things. People who are not busy also ask [ ]
Back in June I wrote about how my relationship with time has changed since I transitioned into self-employment. Reflecting further on this topic, something that s worth highlighting is how much self-employment revealed the kinds of temporal conditions that I need for productive work. For years at my previous salaried position, I despaired over how difficult [ ]
Since leaving salaried employment to work for myself, my relationship to time has transformed in ways that are good, bad, and not ugly, but undeniably .weird. The math of salaried employment is relatively straightforward: you trade a relatively consistent amount of your time for financial compensation (which is also why people who routinely work beyond the [ ]
I usually write my media highlights roundups in late January/early February of each year. But in late January/early February of this year, I was hospitalized for 10 nights with a burst appendix, and then my elderly father was also admitted to the same hospital following a fall. He passed away shortly after his surgery. 2023 [ ]
It s been about eight months since I took the leap to self-employment and building my business. In reality, the transition started much earlier, because it took months of planning and laying the groundwork to follow through on such a major decision. With the end of the year coming up, and today as the anniversary of [ ]
I’m about to embark on a major new professional transition: working full-time for my new business, Memory Rising. Memory Rising provides research, consulting, and archival services for cultural and humanities institutions and other organizations, with expertise on climate change, environmental and labor movements, and Ohio Valley regional history. Memory Rising will offer services such as: [ ]
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Life on the left in 2003 was often an experience of being in the wilderness and yet it was also a much more populated place than any of the war propagandists from that time period ever would admit. I know because I was a [ ]
Like 2021, 2022 was also a tough and weird year. I didn t finish as many books as I would have liked. Maybe 2023 will be better. Also, 2022 will be the last year that I track what I read in WorldCat. Now that it doesn t log the date you add an item to a list, [ ]