Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Last month I paid a forty-dollar late fee on a bill I had already written myself a note to pay. The note was on my phone. I saw it every day. I saw it so many times it became invisible, the same way y...
Read article →I got really good at eye contact when I was eleven. Not because anyone taught me, but because I noticed that when I looked away during conversations adults would say things like are you even listening...
Read article →The grocery store on a Saturday afternoon almost broke me last year. Not in any dramatic way. Nobody yelled. Nothing crashed. It was just the fluorescent lights and the seventeen varieties of pasta sa...
Read article →I sat through a meeting yesterday that lasted forty-seven minutes. The stated purpose was to align on next steps. The actual purpose, as far as I could tell, was to let six people take turns saying th...
Read article →Every Friday afternoon around four o'clock I start to feel something lift. Not dramatically. Just this quiet exhale somewhere behind my sternum, like a fist unclenching. By Saturday morning I am almos...
Read article →Somewhere around 2021, everyone decided that doing your job was a radical act of rebellion. They called it "quiet quitting" and treated it like some kind of generational manifesto, when really it was...
Read article →The open floor plan was not designed by someone who works in one. That is the first thing worth understanding. It was designed by someone who read a McKinsey report about synergy and decided that remo...
Read article →Nobody sends a sympathy card for graduating. There is no casserole. No one shows up at your apartment with a bottle of wine and says I am so sorry for your loss because technically you have not lost a...
Read article →I got the call on a Tuesday. Not even a dramatic Tuesday. A regular one. I had a meeting at two, a dentist appointment I kept meaning to reschedule, and half a sandwich in the fridge I was looking for...
Read article →My dog died on a Wednesday in October and I called out of work on Thursday and my coworker said, genuinely trying to be kind, at least it was not a person. I sat in my car in the parking lot for fifte...
Read article →(article-start) The Grief of a Friendship Ending Has No Protocol. No Breakup Song. No Sympathy Cards. No Closure. She stopped texting back in March. Not all at once. First the replies got shorter. The...
Read article →(article-start) The Grief of the Life You Planned but Never Lived Is the Heaviest Kind Because There Is No Body to Bury. There is a version of me who lives in a house with a red door. She has two chil...
Read article →(article-start) The Moment You Realize You Cannot Fully Express Yourself to Your Parents in Either Language Is Its Own Kind of Orphaning. I called my mother last Sunday and spent forty-five minutes fa...
Read article →First-Generation College Students Do Not Just Attend College. They Translate an Entire World Their Family Has Never Seen. My mother thought a syllabus was a type of exam. I do not say that to embarras...
Read article →Third Culture Kids Belong Everywhere and Nowhere. We Are Fluent in Loneliness That Has No Country. I can order coffee in four languages, navigate airports the way other people navigate grocery stores,...
Read article →My mother has never said I love you to me. Not once in thirty-four years. Not when I graduated. Not when I got married. Not when I called her from the hospital after the car accident. She has never sa...
Read article →(article-start) I Think in One Language and Feel in Another. Therapists Call This Code-Switching. I Call It Tuesday. My mother yells at me in Mandarin and I process the hurt in English. This is not a...
Read article →The bartender handed me a glass that weighed more than my resolve. It was a mocktail, technically. Cucumber and rosemary and some kind of smoked something that made it look like a cocktail in a perfum...
Read article →I stopped drinking two years ago and the strangest part was not the quitting. The strangest part was the interrogation that followed. Why did you stop. Was it a problem. Are you doing a thing. Is it f...
Read article →(article-start) The Loneliest Part of Getting Sober Is Not the Cravings. It Is Realizing That Every Friendship You Had Was Built on a Substance. I quit drinking on a Tuesday. Nothing dramatic happened...
Read article →Addiction Is the Only Disease Where People Tell You to Just Use Willpower. Try Telling a Diabetic to Just Will Their Pancreas Into Working. Nobody walks into a hospital room where someone is hooked up...
Read article →The coffee is bad. That is the first thing you notice. It is always bad, universally bad, bad in a way that suggests the coffee itself has surrendered to the room it is in. Folgers or something worse,...
Read article →(article-start) At 60 Your Phone Stops Ringing. Not Because People Forgot You. Because the World Decided You Were Done Being Relevant. There is a morning that arrives without announcement. You wake up...
Read article →At 40 You Realize That Half Your Life Is Over and You Spent Most of It Doing Things You Were Supposed to Do The actuarial tables are not sentimental. Average life expectancy in the United States hover...
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