I’m leaving later today to attend a week-long writing retreat with Jen Louden (in Taos, New Mexico, squee!) Writing that sentence immediately sparks fear, anxiety, and excitement in me … a flutter just below my sternum that is probably the reason I haven’t slept more than about six hours a night (WAY TOO LITTLE for …
My Chattery book club + online Becoming Me Project group is reading Bari Tessler’s The Art of Money this month, and this week we’ve had our first discussions about that. As I reflect on those two conversations, each with really vulnerable and meaningful moments shared by incredibly brave women, I have a few questions that …
Too often, I feel like I come to my Facebook community, my blog, or my podcast with thoughts I’ve mulled over at length and tied up into a neat package for public consumption. But today? I just don’t have that. Instead, meet the messy middle. I had a rough week… one marked with little pockets …
After an incredibly tortuous journey, in August 2014 I defended my dissertation and officially earned my Ph.D., which would be conferred at some point later on. While I’m proud of my tenacity and proud of the research and writing I did, there’s no question that the best part of the whole process was getting to …
Ok, so, honestly? That title is aspirational. I’m really not someone who runs out into the street, arms stretched wide, yelling, “C’mon, failure! Just try to knock me over!” But last night, while I was attending the Chattanooga Women’s Leadership Initiative IMPACT dinner with colleagues from Chattanooga State, the BBC’s Katty Kay said, “Robots are …
I’ve had the privilege of working with personal trainers at several points during my life, always finding this to be an enjoyable and worthwhile investment of time and money. It’s not so much that I don’t like working out; in fact, I really love it, finding workouts (especially weight training) to be empowering. I build …
This is my third annual best books post (see 2016 and 2017, respectively), and it’s a doozy! This year, I began using Goodreads to track my books, which has become WAY more addictive than I would’ve guessed. (In the same way my DVR is like a to-do list for entertainment, Goodreads has become a to-do …
I remember being scolded as a child for using the word “hate,” a word with such emotional charge my mother assured me it was not warranted … probably ever. “Stupid” had the same charge and was banished from my vocabulary. (As a teenager, I also was told not to use the word “suck” as an …
On this cloudy Friday, I believe a few things to be true: I believe Christine Blasey Ford. I believe Brett Kavanaugh is a basically good man. Notwithstanding his behavior as a teenager and his petulant performance yesterday, which reeked of entitlement. I also believe Kavanaugh doesn’t remember what Blasey Ford accuses him of doing because …
Until I came across the word tournesol in a novel I was reading on my Kindle app the other day, the memory of the word — and the context in which I learned it — was distant and fuzzy in my memory, happily relegated to a zone of neurons I might well never have happened upon …
