I’m sure you’ve heard this comment, or perhaps even said something like it yourself: “Why are you being so defensive?” This is normally said in a way that makes it very clear that defensiveness is a bad thing. I want to know why defensiveness is so awful. If someone is being a jerkface to you, what’s wrong with defending yourself? I asked my husband this question tonight. He said, “There’s nothing wrong with being defensive. Usually, the…
The other day I wrote a post about being cynical in my middle age, positing that perhaps it was because of the polarization we’re feeling in politics and the sense that things aren’t working as they should. I just want things to be fixed. I received a thoughtful comment from a reader that indicated that people on both sides of the political spectrum believe they have the answers to fix what’s going wrong in America.…
I just read the article “The Urban Death Project: Designing a Better Way to Die” and feel it’s so important as a concept that I had to share it here. The article discusses the master’s thesis of Katrina Spade, who wants to provide Americans with an alternative to being buried in a vault with their veins filled with embalming fluid. Spade’s alternative also doesn’t involve being burned down to ash. Instead, she would like to…
I just finished reading “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” by Max Brooks. The book was not on my list for the Year of Creative Reading, but I chose it in order to see how the author presented his story as oral histories. Working in the history field, one of our primary sources of information is oral history, so it was interesting to see how someone adapted this form to fiction.…
A quick post today, an article I want to share that discusses writing and fame. It’s by Jeff Goins and appears on Medium, one of my favorite sites for long-form essays. It’s called “The Truth About Going Viral” and is about what happened when one of Jeff’s blog posts unexpectedly went viral. Interesting to note that it went viral a year after he wrote it, showing that some half-forgotten (or fully forgotten) post you wrote…