write me well

Tag: life experience

  • Gerunds

    Well, if February felt quick, the four months that followed lasted all of five minutes. Which is how you find me, in the near-exact middle of July, deciding it’s time to check back in and think some thoughts online.

    Completely ignoring the raging dumpster fire that is this nation, the first half of 2025 has been rather dreamy – particularly in comparison to the six months that preceded it. Instead of walking through the last however-long sequentially and all of the delightful things that did happen, I’m just going to round-robin my way through some of the sources of joy because this is my slice of the internet and that’s how I want to do it.

    Kevin-ing

    Let’s lead with Kevin.

    Last I wrote, I thought I hadn’t mentioned him here, but turns out I had one time in passing. If you’ve talked to me at any point since August 30, 2024, you know this tabby ball of meows deserves far more than a mention in passing that was so short I didn’t even realize I did it. Here is that more.

    Full disclosure, cat people of the world: it wasn’t until I met Chevy that I really understood why people loved cats. I was born a dog person and knew no other way to exist. What can I say – I like my affection obvious, so visceral that it knocks you over when you come home from work because the affection is a dog that is jumping on you. Chevy changed that. I loved Chevy and Chevy loved me. But Aaron was always her Person, and she loved no one quite as much as she loved her Person.

    Kevin is not perfect. He is needy (we call him special needy) and really doesn’t like it when you play bongos on him. He is a LIAR about having been fed, has a propensity to CONSUME SILICON that had never before been seen by our vet, and for a nearly 15 lb cat he has the meow of a thirteen year old girl from the Valley. But Kevin has decided I am his Person, and dear reader, let me tell you, this is a first time experience for me and I cannot.

    He waits for me to wake up in the morning. He meows at me when I get home. He comes and lays on my chest, getting so close to my face it’s like he’s an infant trying to get that newborn skin-to-skin contact. At night, he sleeps tucked into the crook of my elbow with his chin resting on my forearm. He is The Worst in many ways (usually when he is lying about the fact that he hasn’t been fed), but PAPA I LOVE HIM. He has been no small source of silliness and laughter (and annoyance) and joy since he waltzed, shouting and underfed, into our lives last August. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

    Goal-ing

    Of all of the goals I hoped to achieve when I set up my beloved intentions last January, the one I had the least faith in being able to achieve was, obviously, finding movement.

    PEOPLE, SHE HAS FOUND MOVEMENT.

    For the first time in twenty years, I am enjoying RUNNING. I have been running three times a week for eight weeks and it has been…delightful? I won’t be that person that instantly makes their chosen form of exercise their personality (even though here I am, blogging about it at the first opportunity) but what I will say is this: regularly moving around really is the best way to appreciate my silly little body. You simply cannot go wrong with movement. So, find your movement!!

    And if you think it could be running – or even if you don’t think it could be running – highly recommend investing $5.99 in the Couch to 5k app. Grab a pair of headphones and pretend you’re on The Island with Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, listening to the dulcet tones of an apparently omnipotent woman telling you “Great job deciding to move your body today!” or “Begin your workout now!!”. It also tracks your runs/steps/distance, and genuinely starts from a place of no experience. It may feel silly running for sixty second then walking for ninety seconds eight times in a row, but it truly is effective.  

    Not Work-ing

    Sadly, no, this does not mean I have been off work for four months. Rather, not work-ing refers to an intentional, personal switch in focus from on work to on not work.

    Not work-ing is caring far more about not-work things in your life than the work ones. Reading more. Planning trips. The aforementioned movement. Kevbo. Motorcycle rides. Family, friends, relationships in general. I don’t dwell on my work stress anymore. She is the secular version of letting go and letting god and it is golden.

    Highlights of not work-ing: annual trip to the Bay Area to see friends and Aaron’s family in June, having friends come to stay this past week, hosting floovies (the act of watching a movie while eating food that matches said movie), getting my Italian paperwork up-to-date, making future long-term plans.

    Inspo-ing

    Last weekend Aaron and I saw F1: The Movie and no, it was not the best movie I’ve ever seen. But it WAS the best movie theatre movie I’ve seen in years, and I had truly forgotten just how good a good movie theatre movie experience can be. I am actually debating going to see it again while it’s in theatres because guys, it was just so PRETTY AND FUN. A++ soundtrack, score, cinematography, Kerry Condon, unexpected shots of England. Brad Pitt is the worst but Javier Bardem is not. These days, I take what I can get. I’m okay with a really good movie experience being inspiring.

    Writing???

    HECK YEAH I WROTE WRITING.

    Last but not least, I have started a new something which may or may not go anywhere other than an amorphous Word doc of indeterminate size and shape.

    And that, my friends, is wonderful.  

    So there you have it! Some absolutely made-up gerunds to sum up the last four months. Sorry guys, as they say: you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.

  • Timing

    It’s not lost on me that I’m writing this seated at a coffee shop in Hillcrest, fresh from a visit to Balboa Park with a friend of two decades. I’m visiting San Diego for the first time in five years and it’s as fantastic as I remember: just a bit balmy when I stepped off the plane at eight o’clock yesterday morning, already regretting I’d only be here for thirty-six hours, the harbor and rolling green hills and palm-trees-galore totally unchanged. I booked in a double tattoo appointment a few months ago and it seemed like a reasonable idea at the time. Post appointment and hangouts with my friend (and missing out on a few because of the timing), I wish I’d made it a real trip and had three more days.

    Alas, that’s life. I’m grateful to even be able to make the trip all things considered. The last time I was on a plane, I was one of thirty-seven people, making the mid-pandemic journey from London to San Francisco because I realized about two weeks after my last post that it was time for another major life shift.

    It’s worked out in that I never left California because I didn’t like California. I, in fact, rather love California (see last post for reference). I spent a month in Sacramento before relocating back to the Bay Area, drawn there unexpectedly by an opportunity with my old District Manager to take over a store in Santa Cruz. Living in such a recent past haunt makes the three years I spent in London feel more than a little like a fever dream – a hyper-realistic, life-changing, fantastic fever dream – and being in San Diego again is like another small dose of the same confusing nostalgia. It’s welcome, though. I’ll take any reminder that here or abroad, the places I love aren’t going anywhere. (For now, at least. This is a no doom-scrolling zone.)

    Talking with my friend this afternoon at the park, the phrase “life is a journey” came up. We were joking, but we also were not. We were talking about how life happens and you do things and once they’ve happened, it is what it is. There’s no right or wrong about it, and all you can do is change what you have now if you’re not happy about it. It was an excellent topic of conversation for someone that’s gone through the intense volume of change I have in the past four months.

    I keep getting Instagram and Facebook memories of a year ago, two years ago, three years ago (the most painful, since they’re from my recent arrival to the UK and filled with obnoxious captions like “can’t believe I get to live here FOREVER”). I made the right decision, moving back to California. But I miss London and my life there – desperately, sometimes. As another close friend of mine is fond of reminding me, two things can be true at once. It was the right decision, but sometimes it’s still hard.

    I got to go to my niece’s preschool graduation and mermaid-themed fifth birthday party. I can go out to lunch with or go spend my day off with my sisters or my mom, wandering thrift shops or discovering the best fried chicken sandwiches. I laid by the pool with my best friend and drank margaritas, and remembered for a moment why it’s so easy to not travel when you live somewhere like California: sometimes just the backyard can feel like a vacation. I’ve got a car and drive through pine-filled mountains every day on my way to work, and live in a neighborhood with a coffee shop I can walk to – not to mention the fact that I get to share the place with my boyfriend, a miracle in itself because I’ve known the guy for fifteen years and life is just really fun (and fantastic) that way sometimes, and things have just, well, worked out.

    When I look back at the last three years, I am nothing but proud. If there is anything I’ve learned, it’s that you can think you know exactly what you want and what’s next, and turns out – you 100% do not. And that’s okay.

  • I Promise I Don’t Hate Kids

    When tasked to come up with one thing that every human is universally good at, I’d love to pick something nice. Like being kind, thoughtful, or patient. (Or funny – we should all be so lucky. Imagine a world filled with John Mulaneys!) But in the glaring light of this blog post, not to mention the purposes of my own argument, I’m going to run with judging. Humans are universally good at judging. The more major the subject, task, or behavior, the more intense the judgement. Naturally it would only follow that for women, one of the most prevalent judgements we face is when we decide not to have children.

    It genuinely doesn’t seem to matter why we make that decision, or that of all decisions, this one in particular is the business of absolutely no one but the woman in question. But classic humanity: those very qualifiers obviously make it one of the most widely accepted topics to openly discuss. Prioritizing our careers. Deciding kids aren’t for us. Not being a fan of kids in general. Attempting to stave off overpopulation and reducing our carbon footprints. If there’s one thing you can rest assured when it comes to deciding not to have children, it’s that the majority of the populace will assure YOU that one day, many shriveled years (emphasis on shriveled) down the line, you will regret that decision.

    As a woman that’s fairly sure she won’t be reproducing at any point in her lifetime, I’ve read and enjoyed a large number of snappy comeback lists to just those assertions. Tumblr, Buzzfeed – the internet as a whole is full of them, and they’ve got some great rejoinders. (The internet is also apparently full of renaissance paintings infused with the face of Guy Fieri, something I discovered when trying to find a Mother/Daughter painting for the header of this post. Please go look at them.) Every list makes me laugh, but a friend linked one on Facebook a few weeks ago, and about six GIFs in, a nascent response from a fellow frustrated woman actually gave me pause. It mentioned that her least favorite presumption about us is that women that choose not to have children must, clearly, hate children.

    There aren’t a lot of decisions in the modern world that you can’t unmake. Your career, your education, your streaming subscription. Your marriage. Having pets. Buying a house. Short of those sins that come with a life sentence, pretty much anything can be reversed. But not having kids. That’s fairly obvious, right? Given that certainty, given the inescapable level of commitment that comes with having children, it’s kind of insane that choosing to have kids is a presumptive societal default. Really, it should be the reverse. Unless you’re absolutely over-the-moon certain that parenthood is for you, maybe we should encourage people to hold off.

    There’s no longer a question as to whether humans will survive (well, that’s not entirely true, but let’s just say running out of humans isn’t exactly our problem anymore). So why do we cling to the idea of everyone needing to have children? If anything, we should be grateful that some humans are willing to take one for the homo sapiens team and say “yeah nope” to progeny in general. But a practical argument is hardly guaranteed to stand up against these expectations, so it can be hard to be one of the women that “yeah nopes”. And like any circumstance when you’re judged unfairly, the most hurtful part of it is the conclusions people inevitably draw.

    I couldn’t give a shit that you think I’ll regret this in ten, twenty, thirty years. But I really wish people would stop thinking that just because I don’t want kids, I think they are the eleventh plague, that I’d rather die (or at least grimace) than hold a baby. Maybe, y’know, I’d just rather be Auntie Kathy than Mom. After all, being Mom is a helluva lot of responsibility. All of the things we lightly joke about on those rejoinder lists I’m actually quite serious about. Sure, I’ll never know the love of my own child, but it’s not going to kill me. The risk of what could happen if I did have kids and regretted THAT decision ten, twenty, thirty years down the line is potentially far more painful.

    So we’ve covered the fact that you can’t just assume I hate kids because I don’t want them. But something a lot less talked about, that is actually almost more of deterrent than the kids themselves, is how much I don’t like moms.

    There. I said it.

    It’s not quite that simple, because I don’t dislike all moms. Very far from it! Most moms are pretty great (shout out to mine, she’s one of them). But some moms…whoof. Some moms act like the primary requirement to joining their Motherhood Club is an enduring and unquestionable sense of self-righteousness. I just do not think I am ready to deal with that. I have no interest in being dragged into parenting strategy discussions. No interest in the judgement, almost more severe than what I would have faced had I not had children, that eventually follows when you meet a mom that doesn’t think you should be giving your kid potato chips. And I know. I KNOW: “You’ll never understand because you don’t have children.”

    Well, in the words of Chuck from Sons of Anarchy, I accept that.

    There are other ways to use the energy that mothers expend on loving their own children. I can’t argue that they’re equally fulfilling, but I would argue that they are equally admirable. Working with youth that don’t have supportive family systems. Fostering. Adopting. Volunteering. Or going to the other end of the spectrum – all of those people filled with decades upon decades of gut-wrenching and hilarious stories of their own, sitting in group homes with a weekly visit from family at most. Visiting them, talking with them, keeping them company. There are so many humans out there to love.

    Do I do all of those things? Absolutely not. (Is it physically possible to be that saintly?) But should I feel that I have an unused portion of my heart come my older years because I chose not to have my own kids, I am quite certain in my knowledge of my own spirit that engaging in any of the above would go far to make up the gap. Beyond that, I already have the luxury of (nearly!) two nieces to dote on ceaselessly. Somehow I doubt they’ll begrudge having an extra benefactor should it come down to it, and from what I’ve been given to understand, the Aunt Club is just a touch more chill than the Mom one.

    I am so excited to hear when my friends decide to have children and become mothers. I can’t say I’m passionate about changing diapers, but I’m happy to help and laugh when it’s an awful mess (Huggies are not my strong suit). I do think we should be more aware of how many more people this planet really needs, but I don’t believe restricting how many kids people have is the answer.

    I hope people are equally less judgmental of my decision to go childless, however much judging is their forte. I mean, maybe I will change my mind in ten minutes or three years. That’d be just fine too.

    Because when it comes down to it, there are no wrong answers to whether or not a woman wants to have children. But there is definitely a wrong way to respond.

  • Grief, Or Something Like It

    There are phone calls, and then there are phone calls.

    The second kind become great, memorable divides, minutes-long exchanges that separate Life Before and Life After. They’re the kind that tell you about something that’s already happened, while you’ve been blithely unaware, and suddenly the world shifts. You can’t unhave them and you can’t forget them. Saturday, July 27th, I got the second kind of phone call from my sister. Two transatlantic flights, one attempt to go back to work before I was ready, and some bone-deep jet lag later, I’m still coming to terms with the fact that my dad has died.

    When I went home to visit my family last February, I decided well in advance that I would try to specifically get my dad to engage. He was living with my mom and sister in Georgia and they were taking care of him, a task that became more mammoth as his Type II Diabetes (and stubborness) wore on. His behavior was the same unchanged pattern of the last seven trying years: solving puzzles online, reading articles online, and watching Netflix. Determined to squeeze something else out of him in the six days I visited, and with the resiliance of spirit of someone that didn’t have to deal with his increasingly difficult personality every day, I brought the game Catch Phrase.

    My family has always been terrible at enjoying each other’s complete company. Terrible is a strong word, but the truth of it is that there aren’t a lot of situations where all five of us in the same room ends up being much fun. But the surest fire way to achieve fun throughout childhood was a good card game. It was how my parents had passed their honeymoon and it was still a solid strategy three daughters later. Catch Phrase wasn’t a card game, but I thought it was a better bet, because it forced conversation. You can’t play Catch Phrase – basically $100,000 Pyramid in a pass-around electronic form – without talking to each other excessively. Ideally, also, it would involve a whole lot of laughing.

    Skeptical at first, my dad eventually acquiesced and the four of us sat in the living room, listening to John Anderson, playing Catch Phrase. And I will be forever grateful for that stupid little game, because in those few nights, I saw more of the old dad I remembered than I had seen in years. Sure, before and after he was unchanged, returning to his room and his puzzles once we’d finished. But the during – his thoughtful descriptions, his raised eyebrow at our own, less-than-thoughtful ones, the gleam of genuine amusement and following laughter when the buzzer went off the second he handed the game to my sister – the during I’ll remember forever.

    My dad was a wildly successful workaholic for the majority of my childhood. He’d been a regular full-time employee in the IBM-led tech world of the 1980’s before I was born, but for my entire memorable existence he’d been a charismatic contractor, selling his expertise to assorted companies across a variety of sectors. His contracts would take him all over the county, oftentimes all over the state, and they always paid him very well. My dad loved providing for his family and was fiercely passionate about it; he derived the majority of his joy in life from work, the sense of purpose and affluence it gave him, and most importantly, his ability to support his family. What he didn’t get from that (or our love, of course), he happily got from eating extraordinarily well. My dad was a big guy, and it took big food to keep him that way.

    There wasn’t much that stopped him, either, regardless of what he wanted. He had a steel will that was terrifying to behold, and not just as his child. I imagine dealing with my father in the workplace could be as horrifying as it was inspiring. He had a zero-tolerance policy for bull shit – a life motto of “No Surprises” and “You Can’t Fix Stupid” – that even extended to being too silly in the car. (During an ill-advised family road trip to Louisiana, one of only two such family vacations we went on in my entire childhood, we lost the privilege of going to a theme park on the way due to excessive silliness in the car.)

    In a family with a 4:1 female-to-male ratio, you’d think we would have ended up a pretty emotive, demonstrative bunch. But that was far from the truth. I never, ever doubted that my dad loved me. How he chose to show it, though, was in the way he provided for us, in the experiences he could give us, and from time to time, in a charming affability that made us realize that while poorly-timed silliness on our terms was something he had little patience for, silliness on his own terms was something he enjoyed sharing with us very much. The way my dad expressed love was usually never through words, and, not in the hollow way it sounds, almost always expressed through money. Taking us out to dinner. Paying for our favorite clothes and toys. Buying me an oboe after he’d just bought me a flute because I had the instrumental constancy of, well, an eleven year old. Dad loved us by spoiling us, and he loved it well.

    An imposing six-foot-three inches, confident, mustached, the definition of the sort of gentleman that can only buy his suits at the Big and Tall store: that was the guy I grew up with, and I was often in awe of him. We didn’t talk about a lot, but I loved listening to him, and most of my young memories of him are more of just going on rides with him than anything else. (He was a major fan of driving.) My sisters and I spent many an hour standing behind his office chair, peering at his computer monitor over his shoulder, impatient for him to finish explaining his newest Excel spreadsheet. And while we didn’t always have the same opinions, we could always be sure he would share his, and he always spoke with authority and inflection on most any subject at hand. He could sear you and your opinions with a look.

    I share all of this so you can understand just how hard it was to process the person he became after 2008, the person I visited last February.

    Between the sudden death of his best friend, who was almost ten years his junior, and the economic recession, which slowly saw the last of his contracts permanently dry up, my dad was a vastly different person from 2008 onwards. Never a man of many hobbies, with no work to keep him busy, he became a recluse, hyper conscious of the family budget and more inclined to spend time looking up minutia on the internet than to spend it speaking with any of us. Despite numerous efforts to network, he continually struggled to find any new jobs. Eventually he just stopped looking.

    It sounds so simple in hindsight, but it took us years to realize he was depressed, and years more to talk to him about it. But by the time we did, it was too late. Maybe because he thought it was weak, maybe because he genuinely did not think anything could be changed, maybe because he simply did not have the wherewithal to try – whatever his reasons, he never did anything to try and fix it. For seven years, it got progressively harder to keep the faith that he would ever manage to. From the moment I got that phone call from my sister, I realized a harsh truth: now, he never would.

    Losing your dad is never easy, but my dad’s health had been waning for years, and he had not been “himself” for a decade. I genuinely thought I had done most of my mourning for the person that raised me, because so much of him was already gone. Boy, was I wrong. I hadn’t realized that however much I had accepted where he currently was, that was NOT the same as him being gone. While he was still alive, there was still a chance – however impossible, however small – that he would rally. That the dad I had grown up with, dynamic and confident and charming and vital, would come back. I don’t think I will ever stop being sad that he just couldn’t. Because of his depression.

    Worse, it hurts that he never felt like he could talk to us about it. I would have given anything to lend just five minutes of my own drive and self confidence to my dad – from whom, through both nature and nuture, so much of those qualities were sourced – to get him to see he had the strength to get through it. To see that it wasn’t weakness to talk about it, that we absolutely knew he still loved and cared about us. To see that he didn’t need money to prove it and that all we wanted was for him to express it through words. All we wanted was a conversation about something other than the weather, a day spent on something other than puzzles and streaming more NCIS.

    My dad had advanced Type II Diabetes, Congestive Heart Failure, and was severely overweight. He passed peacefully in his sleep on a Saturday morning from a combination of his physical ailments. But I would argue that depression was his deepest illness, and that I couldn’t help him with it will always be one of my deepest regrets. I have my suspicions, but the truth is I’ll never know what it was that stopped my dad from being able to share what he was going through. All I know is he was painfully good at faking otherwise – he was always “doing good”. So in his memory, I want to take the time to say that if you are reading this, and you are “doing good”, you may not feel ready to talk about it yet. But I want you to know that when you are, I am someone that will always be here to listen.

    I didn’t know how to help my dad and so I settled for telling him that I loved him, showing him that I loved him. It wasn’t much towards the end – if I could change how often I called him over the last year, God you know I would – but I know as much as you can know anything in this life that he knew he was loved. Sometimes that is the best that you can do.

    It sounds stupid, so basic, but the strangest part of death is that no matter where you go, you will never find that person. No matter where you go. But there is a constant comfort in memories, perfect and imperfect, and while I will be sad for a long time, I will also be okay. I will move forward and eventually stop having those cutting, random thoughts – that my dad won’t ever know the person I marry, that he won’t get to see my neices grow up – and realize that for my dad, this was the best case scenario. More than anything, I will always be grateful for the time I did have, and everything wonderful he did give me. Because old those memories may be, but they will never fade, nor will their impact, nor my image – strong, dynamic, and loving – of my dad.

  • Bio Pages Are the Worst

    First off, cards on the table, I’m writing this about myself. All-powerful-Oz reveal. So, if I go and write an entire bio page about myself in the third person, it feels unutterably pretentious. Whether or not that’s true, or if the queasy pompous- feels it triggers are really an impostor syndrome flare up, is up to the internet jury.

    Instead of waiting for feedback I’m going to listen to Laura Branigan’s Gloria and write a weekly blog post that will for the foreseeable future function as my contributor’s bio page* for Viv + Kit. (I am already so into this idea that I think this will be the policy for all new contributors. The Laura Branigan part will be encouraged but optional.)

    *Editors note from 25/10/20 – this is now somewhat outdated, primarily due to the fact that my career went full dumpster fire at the end of 2019 and I pivoted accordingly

    Orange County born, Sacramento raised, and a jure sanguinis dual Italian American citizen, I’ve lived in all the best parts of California (I’m looking at YOU, San Diego) and now call London home. Day-to-day I’m head person in charge at Anthropologie’s flagship European store on Regent Street.

    Viv + Kit was borne of a desire to not only create and write on the regular, but to try and be a bright spot in any single person’s day, one post/list/essay at a time. You’re not going to find any Great Gatsby sort of authorship under my name, and I don’t know that I’m capable of changing anyone’s life or perspective in a major way. But if I can throw together a niche favorites list or snappy diatribe on how I think you should judge your success versus how society does that elicits just ONE laugh or smile, then I’m all about it.

    I used to really beat myself up because I felt like even post undergraduate education, I didn’t know “a lot” about anything. Like, most English Lit majors may not have a career waiting for them on the other side of that graduation ceremony stage, but at least they could walk you through Paradise Lost. No such luck here. When I was 22, the thing in life I knew the most about and was the best at was the “hip” import retailer Cost Plus World Market – real talk. I started working there as a cashier out of high school in 2007 and returned to the life when six months of dallying with the real world got me (and my degree) nowhere.

    Making a career out of retail has been a JOURNEY for me, mostly because I hate the idea of doing something other people don’t think is cool. (If you didn’t think I was basic before, there you have it. I’ve got the career aspiration equivalent of a pumpkin spice latte.) I derived the majority of my self worth for years out of what my job was, and for someone who viscerally remembers standing in the stock room of her old World Market, deciding to sign on for $30k in college debt because she REFUSED to be stuck in retail forever, having a career in retail was some Old Fashioned level bitter gall.

    But I’m exceptionally lucky in my skills and my interests (and my flawless aesthetic, I tell myself), because once I developed enough as a person to realize job status does not equal personal value / a job is a job no matter how you slice it, the two combined to land me in a career that’s ironically taken me everywhere I could’ve asked for.

    I was just biding my time while my dual Italian American citizenship stagnated when my District Manager approached me about becoming a supervisor with World Market. Two years later I was a Store Manager when a customer, who apparently worked at Anthropologie, recognized that my pants were from Anthro, and reached out to recruit me when I impressed her with my service. I worked for Anthro for two years and then it gave me the perfect in to move back to the UK, a goal I’d had since the second I left Norwich after university and had all but given up on by 2017.

    While customers, yes, can be challenging (when they’re not recruiting you), what nobody tells you about retail is that it’s like any other job – it’s defined by the people and what you put into it. I’ve worked with a handful of characters that I could happily do with never seeing again, but for the vast majority of my career I’ve had the pleasure of working with and learning from some most excellent specimens of human cool. In retail, there’s a 50/50 shot that every one of your coworkers has a side-hustle they wish was their main hustle – who, after all, would actively choose retail, is the running joke – and those side hustles are always fascinating.

    Over the years and with the help of some absolutely stellar professional mentors (Ed, if you’re reading this, you are still my hero), I’ve become a really great retail manager, and I genuinely enjoy it.

    Given all of the above, a lot of what I write comes from a place of self criticism, weighing my own values and journey against those of society, trying to take life a little less seriously, and reveling in and laughing at all of the conclusions I draw from my rose-colored view of my past and potential future. When you read something I’ve written, it’s likely to be laced with at least one of those concepts. I like to think of myself as an unlicensed authority on them.

    Other things I’ll chalk up as interesting qualifiers: experience living abroad and far from my family (not once, but twice!), unparalleled skill at quoting/making very specific pop culture references, and overusing a new word every 3-4 years. Ten years ago it was “epic”. Right now it’s “niche”. I enjoy making people laugh and I enjoy immersing myself in good music, fun pop culture lists, great fashion, highly-specific history subjects, and anything well-written. So it should surprise no one that I’m the founder of this website.

    My greatest fear is that when I write I’m like Midge Maisel telling her manager Susie that working every dinner party she can snag an invitation to is the same as successfully working an actual comedy club crowd. But let’s be honest. If that’s what’s happening here, there are worse people to be than Midge, center stage in someone else’s living room, making her friends and borderline strangers laugh. (Right…?)