I’ve been teaching workshops on how to be a blogger for the past three years. They’re four-week courses where we walk through everything from how to structure an effective headline to how to not care when some stranger tells you that your grammar sucks and you shouldn’t be a writer. In the very first class of every section, I make a big deal out of …
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I don’t know when the term self-love was invented, but I’m really psyched in happened in my heyday [heyday here being defined as old enough to understand it, young enough to accept it]. Conceptually I think self-love is mission critical – the mission being to have a happy, healthy life with as few enemies as possible. I am one of those people (read: millennials that moved to …
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This Sunday’s New York Times features an op ed about the women’s march movement. The title: Since When Is Being a Woman a Liberal Cause? The first line of the piece is a fascinating question: who gets to define what it means to be pro-women? I don’t know the official answer but right now a group of women is making a play for …
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I am stumped about what to write this morning because anything non political feels trivial, unimportant, like a waste of time and anything political feels exhausting, too hard, like it’s slowly frying my brain. Yesterday, I woke up for my morning write like I have every weekday for the past month, plus. I started this new routine on January 2nd – the first day …
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Yesterday I chatted with an aspiring writer/performer about how the hell she’s going to become a successful writer/performer. This motivated, passionate, go-getter went to my alma mater, Boston College (so very sorry Matt Ryan…). She found her way to me through my sister who was in her same a cappella group that has an alumni network she used to ask if anyone could help her …
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I can’t stop thinking about this article that I read in The New York Times back in 2015. Click the picture to read it. Short story short: a bunch of psychics convicted of various fraud crimes in the New York courts finally started coming clean to parole boards. One – Celia Mitchell, 38, was asked about her business very directly. (Quoting from the article): “What …
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Yesterday I tried to decide not to be anxious. No. Sorry. If I said that to my therapist she would say, “Jessie, you know anxiety is the part of the human condition.” Yesterday I tried not to let my anxiety win the day. Without getting into it, I got some exciting but overwhelming news. This is good news, the kind people hear and say congratulations! …
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I caught an NPR interview with novelist Toni Morrison as I was driving home yesterday. Did you know that Toni Morrison – the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom winning writer (among a million other awards) did not start writing until she was 39 years old?! Also her real name is Chloe but it accidentally changed to Toni, which is short for …
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I’ve been really haunted by something that I heard RuPaul say during an NPR news interview a little over a year ago. It was right after Ru’s Emmy win for best host of RuPaul’s Drag Race – so that’s September of 2016. It was a historic moment and long-time coming for the drag icon. He has hosted the epic Drag Race on Logo for eight seasons but has been …
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Last night I watched a few episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, in honor of Mary Tyler Moore. You can watch old episodes on Hulu, if you have Hulu, which I recommend you get so you can watch old episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show. I didn’t search for episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, even though that’s technically more Mary. I didn’t look to see where I …
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