The Dichotomy of Good & Evil
On a recent flight that was delayed many hours, I sat staring out the window listening to a series of downloaded podcasts by Jordan Peterson. He manages to seem sure of himself while also contemplative; certainty mixed with a sense of possibly changing his mind. His is an appealing temperament, whether or not you agree with him.
Read full storyPlanes, Pains, & Automobiles
The woman at the check in desk at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Sacramento was wearing a mask. She wasn't the only person I saw in Sacramento still wearing a mask; the woman at the Grocery Outlet who fingered no less than a dozen oranges before finally settling on one. The couple in the burger joint next door, who sat outside, fully masked, as they waited for their roasted edamame and kombucha beer. One of my Uber drivers, a bellhop, the girl sitting next to me on the flight, a lady on the treadmill in the hotel gym. I felt as if I'd stepped back time say, a year or three, when the whole world was masked and mad about it.
Read full storyAncestry Kits & St. Patrick's Day
Are you Irish? said the man on the other end of the phone when he heard my last name. "McMahon," I had told him. "With two n's?" he asked. "No, like Ed McMahon," I answer, "M-c-M-a-h-o-n."
Read full storyForehead Wrinkles & Living in the Moment
My forehead feels wrinkled from frowning into my computer screen too much. If people were not so demanding, I would not have to frown as much, and my forehead would not get so wrinkly. I wonder if men ever worry about their foreheads wrinkling, or if they even notice. Probably, forehead wrinkles make men seem thoughtful and distinguished. My lightly wrinkled forehead reminds me both of a bulldog puppy and Babagesh.
Read full storyEating Disorders, Adolescence, & Overcoming Bullies
“Sarah,” my teacher drones, not looking up from his attendance sheet. I numbly chirp, “here,” and continue staring out the window. I’m wearing jeans and my boyfriend’s hooded sweatshirt. My boyfriend goes to a different school, nearly an hour’s drive away, so I’m only able to see him on weekends. I enjoy the space between us, as well as the social capital that having a boyfriend grants me. In adolescence, the hallmark of a cool girl was wearing an oversized sweatshirt that smelled of Axe body spray and teenaged boy sweat.
Read full storyAll We Notice is Where We Focus
"Wasn't she being a bitch?" my friend asked me. We were standing outside of David's Bridal, in a sprawling mall that is egregiously large and difficult to navigate. There are escalators and smoothie shops and a Wetzel's Pretzel sandwiched in between the Container Store and Best Buy and Baskin Robins. Spend money, says the mall, on all of these things you'll never need, not even once. My friend was referring to the associate who was helping her try on wedding dresses. "Not really," I answered, "she seemed perfectly nice to me."
Read full storyWelcome to My Brain
Below is an inelegant menagerie of things I thought about, today, in no specific order and with no specific meaning. Before finishing this, I went down the deep, dark rabbit hole known as Zillow. What I was looking for exactly, I wasn’t quite sure. Every house I saw was either ugly and rundown and affordable or overpriced and gorgeous. Do I need a house? No, not really. But there is something very satisfying about looking; judging the layout and paint colors while also understanding that I am in no way positioned to afford any of them.
Read full storyLearning to Fail Gracefully
I’m not writing about failure today because I failed at anything in particular recently. I’ve failed at plenty, though. I’ve dropped out of races, gone through dozens of job interviews that never resulted in offers, submitted my writing to publications only to have it rejected time after time after time. I’ve failed tests and I’ve failed in the workplace and I’ve failed in relationship with others. There is no area of life that goes untouched by failure, so we may as well embrace it. Failure, to me, is synonymous with persistence. You only fail if you fail to try again.
Read full storySexism in Sport
"You're fast now, but you're young," one of my high school teachers told me, "girls always slow down as they grow up." I was a Sophomore, barely fifteen. So far, I'd had a good amount of running success, in a big-fish-small-pond sort of way. As far as growing into womanhood, I'd already done a lot of developing; I'd stopped getting taller, developed breasts, gotten my period (once), and didn't really understand what he meant. As far as I was concerned, I was done growing up, physically at least.
Read full storyBlack Canyon 100K Recap
2023 marked the 10th annual running of the Black Canyon 100K. The course is point-to-point (love) with a net downhill (fast), with most of the climbing coming in the second half of the race (ouch).
Read full storyHappy Stupid Love Day
I'm not a huge fan of Valentine's Day. Most people who say that are either single and lying or coupled and tired. Personally, my birthday is only a week before it, so everyone I've ever known romantically has lumped my birthday and Valentine's Day together, the same thing that happens to kids born on Christmas Eve. "These flowers are for your birthday and Valentine's Day."
Read full storyLiving With Death
"There are no cemeteries here," Mike said the other day, as if he wanted there to be lots of cemeteries everywhere, always. We were driving somewhere, and he thought, for a split second, that a grove of young trees wrapped in burlap were headstones. He seemed disheartened to realize that they were just saplings, not dead people.
Read full storyDry(ish) January
Tis the season of broken New Years' resolutions (how are yours going?). Some people bought a gym membership they've already stopped using. Some people started and stopped a juice cleanse, and some of us vowed to stop engaging in traffic-induced altercations. My resolution was to drink less, so I stopped entirely for about 3 weeks. Unsurprisingly, I felt great. It wasn't hard to stop drinking because I don't drink that much anyway. However, even a glass of wine at night was leaving me feeling foggy the next morning. Not shocking, since alcohol is technically a toxic substance.
Read full storyDirty Thirty
On Monday, I stood beside a table at a tradeshow in the lower level of a Marriott in Austin, TX. Outside, sidewalks were littered with downed trees from a recent ice storm, "I've never seen anything like it," one woman told me, her eyes widening, "Texas isn't built for ice." At the trade show, I drank two lattes, pet a puppy, and chitted with anyone willing to chat. Later, I celebrated my 30th birthday by eating a small package of Swedish Fish while watching Firefly Lane on the plane ride home. Thirty was feeling a lot like 29.
Read full storyThe Dark Triad & People Who Exhaust Me
I'm eating granola out of a paper cup with a plastic baby spoon, on the tenth floor of a Marriot in downtown St. Louis. I'm drinking sauvignon blanc out of a plastic cup, wondering if this makes me trashy or resourceful. Speaking of trash, the worldwide human population produces 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage every year. I imagine a trash barge floating off the pacific coast, spilling over with human refuse, my tiny blue plastic baby spoon balanced precariously on top.
Read full storyWorking From Home
I work from the second bedroom, which is a relatively new concept for me as I've lived most of my life with one (or none) bedrooms. When the pandemic first struck, I was living with a roommate. We both suddenly had to work from home, holing up in our respective bedrooms and trying, with some difficulty, to remain productive. I put my laptop on top of my dresser and spent over a year working two feet away from my bed. My bathroom was eight feet away, my kitchen was ten. I realized, like many of us did, that I didn't need to commute to an office to get my job done. My roommate, on the other hand, wallowed in her room eating chocolate cake by the fistful and drinking rosé by the pint glass.
Read full storyCome To The Beach With Me
I wish you could be here right now, on the beach with me. It's mid-January and there is a slight, misting rain. The ocean is a shade greyer than the sky, and in the gap between the clouds and the water there is a small dash of sun. Dark orange, the color of the egg yolks from organic, free-range chickens. There was a farm near where I grew up that sold eggs like that on the side of a sleepy, two-lane country road. Organic, free-range, non-GMO, brown and blue spotted eggs. Perfect, without even trying to be.
Read full storyTerrible, Terrible Vision
"What exit is that?" I asked Mike, on one of our many drives to God-Knows-Where. We go so many places that they blur together like so many cars on so many congested, L.A.-adjacent interstates.
Read full storyA Love Story
I just Googled, "Do cats take on the personality traits of their owners?" because my (very thoughtful) boyfriend, Mike, suggested that my anxiety may have worn off on my cat, aptly named Chub Chub for the little pad of flesh that hangs below his lower haunches.
Read full storyCreativity, Human Connection, and Chat GPT
One of my friends hasn't used social media in over a decade. She briefly started an Instagram account and within weeks, abandoned it entirely, "I just don't see the appeal," she said. I admired her casual disdain for something so many of us don't even just want, but need. People walk around with headphones on and their noses buried in screens. We shut the world out at the same time we demand to be seen and heard, and idiotic irony at best. After all, if everyone is talking, there is no one to listen. And, since we're all talking all of the time, it stands to reason that most of us have nothing to say.
Read full story