Something happened at the end of 2021. The specifics don’t matter at this point, but the gist of it was a “dream” I almost got, had within reach, and then didn’t get. Everyone who knew about it consoled me. The weirdest part of all of it? I didn’t care. All…

“The only place you can find love in Memphis is at the gentlemen’s club — at least then you know what you’re paying for, and they won’t steal your car.” –my Uber driver, Earnest. June 2022. CW: Uvalde, mental health struggles, and secondhand curse words. Getting on a plane is…

Something is sitting in the pit of my stomach. Something in my heart that isn’t entirely hardened by tragedies and violence is stirring. At first, I read the news out of Buffalo with the eye of an American who is used to mass shootings. I moved on through my day…

For most of my life, the idea of being a “dog person” was foreign to me. In my house growing up, our dogs were an afterthought. They were small and lived mostly in the backyard. I assume someone fed them, but I don’t recall who. I know they were loved…

Slack is down this morning, as is Peloton. So now, I have a legitimate excuse not to get on the bike with this extra time I have on my hands. I left my bullet points for a presentation I had to do in a Slack message, and just had to…

The bright white light of the giant video screen bounced off roughly 40 similarly-balding heads, like three dozen eggs lined up waiting to hatch. It is almost the Q&A portion of the young scholar’s research and she is prepared for any question about the methodology of her modeling approach, the…

Marathons can shine a mirror on the parts of our lives we’d rather not see, but they can also teach us tough life lessons we need to hear. — “If you go to this restaurant my cousin owns, and you don’t like it, you can murder me.” This is the first thing I write down in my journal during marathon weekend. Our Turo host tells us this as he is driving us from LAX to the off-site location he…

Warning: if you are totally fine right now and everything is great, this isn’t the article for you. I’m super happy for you, but this space is for those of us running on fumes. This piece originally appeared on December 7th, 2021 on ELGL’s Morning Buzz *** For the last…

This spring, I started a Substack newsletter about life. It was going swimmingly-I was religious about my weekly updates about where and when I cried in public, and the journey I was on to reclaim my mental health. As summer approached, I took a week off from writing, and that…