I’ve actually spent most of my life trying to build a home, before I even knew why. I just didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. For years, I thought I was collecting people. Communities.Careers.Ideas.Relationships. And looking back, I wasn’t collecting any of those things. I was searching for somewhere to belong. For a long…
I don’t think people miss pop culture. I think people miss the benefits of automatic synchronization. Friendships have become transportation vehicles for offloading shared interests. Not even connection, exactly. Just verbal diaherea for what you’ve experienced lately. At least, thats what operates on the surface. What happens inside? Something much stranger than that. You finish…
You used to be able to assume people saw the same things. We watched TV shows on certain nights of the week. Waited for a new song to drop on the radio. Memorized the same commericals. Not universally. But enough of us did it in our respective fandoms that there were common threads. Enough that:…
I didn’t think it would matter that much. It was just a song.Just a moment.Just one of those things you don’t plan for, but you do it anyway. But I keep coming back to that memory. We were singing Bohemian Rhapsody. In the bar, of course. Rob, Nick, Chris and I. Probably after a shift…
In the last couple of essays, I’ve been circling the same idea from different angles. What maintains us and what happens when we lose track of it. Internal.Relational.Cultural. But there’s a third part to this. A practical question – how can you actually maintain yourself? Personal. The lens from me matters. The cultural lens matters….
I watched John Candy: I Like Me recently. As you may know, I’m a child of the 80s and have loved all sorts of films for most of my life, but I have a particular soft spot for directors like John Hughes, Ron Howard and Chris Columbus and films released between the the 1980s and…
I’ve started to notice something uncomfortable about myself. I don’t just have “good days” and “bad days.” A cliche that doesn’t truly do justice to what happens when I’m uneven. I’m either maintaining myself… or I’m not. And when I’m not, everything feels off. My energy drops. My patience shortens. My creativity disappears. My ability…
Have you ever noticed how often you adjust yourself mid-conversation? It’s a subtle adjustment too. You soften a statement.You explain your reasoning twice.You reframe something you were already clear about. Not because you were wrong. Because you could feel the friction from the other party. And of course, it doesn’t feel like a loss when…
I finally finished Cowboy Bebop last week, (the original, not the 2019 live-action remake) and what stayed with me caught me off guard. It wasn’t the action or the music. It was the feeling that no one on that ship was moving forward. Spike is trapped in a past life he can’t let go of.Jet…
I was born in 1985, which means I grew up in a strange and wonderful pocket of Star Wars history. I was old enough to experience the cultural gravity of the original trilogy, but young enough that the prequels felt like my Star Wars. For a long time, the galaxy far, far away was defined…