Hardcore Norm: Because dressing different is such a cliché
The week before, at a craft beer tasting party at an indie advertising agency in Silver Lake, a sculpture artist was remarking about recently looking through photos of style choices from the aughts. “What was I thinking,” she said in bewilderment. That evening she was wearing a black tank top, and, like, pants. Maybe three quarter length? Or not? Maybe black jeans? Or not-jean pants? I couldn’t recall. Perhaps, I thought, this was just a symptom of getting older. There was some kind of sartorial giving a shit phase that we had all grown out of. But it turned out this, too, was a trend. Kids, too young to have grown out of anything, were dressing this way.
Making the choice to believe in people, or: Why I choose to be “naïve”
When someone cuts me off in traffic, I imagine that they’re in a terrible hurry and didn’t see me. When a young man asks to use my cell phone in a bad part of town, I hand it over and ask if he needs anything else. When I’m taking a Greyhound bus ride and the bus is half full of freshly released prisoners, I always happen to end up right in the middle of their group of seats. I am often called naïve. But I won’t let that change my world.
This Game of Thrones party snack spread should win the Iron Throne by rights
The most important thing that has every happened to me, my reason for living — Game of Thrones — is back on the air. Every Sunday I have a group of friends over to my apartment and we watch the magic and the madness unfold together. Usually I just put out some cheese and crackers, with enough wine to make Cersei proud. So imagine how huge my eyeballs got when I saw this spread show up in our Flickr pool…
Learning to fold: everything I know about laundry I learned from working shitty retail jobs
When I was in college, I worked for The Disney Store. They taught me this thing called “The Disney Fold” … a laundry folding method that I use to this day.
Should I volunteer or start a job?
I know that volunteering would be an amazing way to gain the experience that I need, but with graduation quickly coming and all my debt looming in the distance, I worry if I can afford it and if it’s worth the risk. Then again, I have had a few professors tell me that I should get a job instead of volunteering or interning, but I worry that no one will hire me due to lack of experience.
Be your own cheerleader against the zombies of self-doubt and celebrate your accomplishments
When you accomplish a goal, are you the type to doubt that your accomplishment is worth acknowledging at all? If you succumb to the zombies of self-doubt, you risk burnout, loss of motivation, and being generally bummed out. Besides that, the zombies are really not good for your self-esteem. I struggle against them myself. Here’s what I’ve come up with to try to help remind myself to be my own cheerleader and celebrate my accomplishments.
How to write a grad school CV that shows off the goods
I need a CV to complete my application for a graduate program in divinity — and I have no idea where to start! I did some Googling to try and find a good template, style guide, or even sample and immediately got stuck in a black hole of garbage career advice websites. Could anyone recommend a website or app I can use to generate a quality CV, or at least a style guide?
My accidental social media experiment: How Facebook changed the way we define friendships
I have had a love/hate relationship with Facebook since the get-go. Yet, most of my online family, as well as former co-workers, classmates, and even long lost friends and family now connect there. Then the holidays came this year. A time of numerous social gatherings with friends and family you don’t see nearly enough. And a little phrase kept sticking in my brain. The first time I kind of just laughed it off. “Oh yeah, I saw that on Facebook.” Could I be divulging too much on social media?
So I decided to try my accidental experiment. I deactivated my Facebook account.