Cinemorphosis

Tag: books

  • Lot’s Wife Was Human—And So Are You

    Lot’s Wife Was Human—And So Are You

    The story of Lot’s wife is usually trotted out as a biblical “gotcha”—a cautionary tale about disobedience, attachment, and the fatal cost of looking back. But really, it’s much darker, much richer. It’s about the soul-crushing gravity of nostalgia, the seductive pull of the past, and how the refusal to fully commit to forward motion—spiritually, morally, existentially—can leave us frozen, calcified, halfway between escape and surrender.

    Lot’s wife is never named in the Genesis account. She’s just “Lot’s wife,” a narrative afterthought, a supporting character reduced to a cautionary statue. And yet her fate is more memorable than her husband’s, etched into the landscape as a monument to hesitation.

    Fortunately, Midrashic literature gives her a name—Ado, or more memorably to my ear, Edith. Maybe it’s the residue of All in the Family, but Edith conjures a kind of moral warmth: a woman who feels deeply, who wants to do right, but is also tragically susceptible to emotion and memory. I prefer Edith to “Lot’s wife” not for historical accuracy, but for dignity. Edith feels human, conflicted, real.

    I don’t think Edith turned around because she was vain or shallow. I think she turned because she was haunted. She turned because the past was more than rubble—it was love, memories, people. Her heart was a complex web of longing, and it snagged her. The salt wasn’t a punishment. It was a crystallization of what happens when our nostalgia outweighs our conviction.

    And let’s be honest: Who among us doesn’t have some briny lump of regret weighing us down? Some internal salt pillar we’ve built in the shape of a younger self we can’t stop worshiping?

    Our culture is Edith’s playground. Social media, advertising, and even the algorithms know exactly how to pander to the Edith within. I can’t scroll without being invited into some “Golden Age of Bodybuilding” time warp: vintage photos of Arnold, Zane, Platz, Mentzer; protein powder reboots; playlists that reek of adolescent testosterone and gym chalk. Jefferson Starship and Sergio Oliva, side by side. It’s like being invited to embalm my past and celebrate its eternal youth. I can join message boards and talk shop with other proud monuments to vanished glory, all of us reenacting the same ritual: remembering what life used to feel like. Not what it is.

    This, I suspect, is what it means to turn to salt. Not just to long for the past, but to despise the present. To dig our heels into a world that no longer fits and spit at progress as if it betrayed us. To canonize a version of ourselves that no longer exists, then try to live in its shadow.

    But maybe Edith’s not just a warning. Maybe she’s a mirror. A deeply flawed, deeply human figure who reminds us that the instinct to look back isn’t evil—it’s inevitable. And maybe we don’t conquer that instinct so much as we recognize it, name it, and learn when to say: Enough. That life was real, and it was mine. But I’m walking forward now.

    Or at least trying to.

  • The Loneliness Loop: Meghan Daum and the Limits of Solitude

    The Loneliness Loop: Meghan Daum and the Limits of Solitude

    I’m working my way through The Catastrophe Hour, Meghan Daum’s latest collection of personal essays. Now in her mid-fifties, Daum is unapologetically single and childless by design, having long ago decided that marriage and parenting weren’t roles she could convincingly—or willingly—perform. Much of her work is a dispatch from the front lines of solitude. And she’s damn good at it.

    What Daum does better than most is forge an instant intimacy with her reader. Her essays feel like front porch conversations at dusk—no performance, no agenda, just two adults quietly deconstructing the wreckage of modern life. Her voice evokes the same soulful, offhand brilliance I admire in Sigrid Nunez’s novels: smart without pretense, vulnerable without begging.

    But by the halfway mark, the essays begin to blur. There’s a tonal and thematic sameness that settles in—like the ambient hum of a refrigerator you only notice when it stops. The introspective loop tightens. The sharp lens that once turned mundane moments into epiphanies starts to feel like someone narrating their week out loud after too many days alone.

    There’s the grief over dead dogs. The endless parsing of domestic minutiae. The architectural dream house that never quite materializes. And those fragmented, overstimulated city-life encounters that feel less like essays and more like repurposed Substack entries. It’s not that these topics lack merit—it’s that, in aggregate, they start to feel like what happens when no one interrupts you for too long.

    Now, I say this as a card-carrying member of the Navel-Gazers Guild. I recognize the signs. I know the thrill of dissecting one’s inner weather systems for an imaginary audience. So I don’t say this to judge Daum, but to observe that the limitations of a fully interior life—however self-aware—do begin to show.

    Still, dismissing Daum’s collection as mere navel-gazing would be both lazy and wrong. Her prose is laced with hard-earned wisdom and an acid wit that’s as refreshing as it is unsparing. When she hits, she hits hard—and truthfully. And that, more than novelty or plot, is why I keep turning the pages.

  • The Gold and Purple Pyramids at the Gates of Heaven

    The Gold and Purple Pyramids at the Gates of Heaven

    Last night, I dreamed I lived in heaven—and like most people blessed beyond comprehension, I had absolutely no idea.

    The dream began in a hectic classroom, as these things often do. I was teaching at a strange college campus. The students were more postgrad in their maturity and engagement than freshman—mature, sharp, and fully caffeinated on the joy of learning.

    We were deep in discussion, when I glanced out the window and saw rain falling in soft sheets. I drifted, just for a second, and in that brief lapse, the class was commandeered—gracefully—by one of my more opinionated students, Tim Miller, moonlighting as a podcaster and self-appointed co-professor.

    Tim, without missing a beat, told everyone to take out the assigned blue textbook. The expensive one. The one I myself had never read. I looked at the book with the guilt of a host who’s never tasted his own hors d’oeuvres. Trying to recover, I asked what they thought. They said it was “okay”—the academic kiss of death. I nodded solemnly and was mercifully saved by the end of class.

    I looked at the exit and saw a nearsighted colleague half my age pushing a fleet of book carts. I offered to help. He kindly accepted my offer—but by the time I reached the carts, he had finished everything himself. He waved goodbye, like a benevolent young professor who didn’t need me after all.

    As I walked through the corridor, I spotted something. A green coffee mug I’d abandoned earlier on a table, shimmering like a forgotten relic. I scooped it up and raced across campus in the rain, placing it delicately on the windowsill of the library. Two librarians emerged, eyes wide with wonder, as if I’d returned the Ark of the Covenant. They smiled as if I’d done something sacred.

    Onward. The rain kept falling, warm and tropical, more blessing than burden. I reached for my phone–the same emerald green as the coffee mug–now coated in fine beach sand. I frantically wiped it clean, restoring it to its gleaming perfection.

    I wasn’t driving. I never did. I preferred walking the five miles home, savoring the trek. In the distance, my residence came into view: three mountain-sized pyramids rising into the mist, woven from purple and gold stone, arranged in a mesmerizing zigzag pattern. I’d always loved purple—no surprise there—but for the first time, I saw the gold properly. I normally detest gold. Too garish. But this gold? This gold was alive. Deep, radiant, humming with mystery.

    I realized, with a kind of thudding wonder, that I lived there. Among the pyramids. In the mist. In heaven. And somehow, until that moment, I’d never truly seen it.

    Then I woke up, soaked not in rain but contrition, and wondered: How much of my real life do I miss by failing to see what’s already shimmering around me? What marvels have I demoted to the mundane? What if heaven isn’t a destination but a perception we keep forgetting to use?

  • Solitude Is My Boyfriend (And He Doesn’t Snore)

    Solitude Is My Boyfriend (And He Doesn’t Snore)

    In her essay “Same Life, Higher Rent,” Meghan Daum compares her life in 1997 to her life in 2017 and reaches a deflating, oddly liberating conclusion: nothing has changed. At 47 and freshly divorced, she’s more or less the same person she was at 27. Still single. Still chasing deadlines. Still drinking coffee, poking at takeout sushi, and trying to keep multiple Word docs open on her MacBook while ignoring the siren song of Twitter and low-stakes Amazon purchases.

    There is one glaring difference: her rent has skyrocketed and her cognitive bandwidth has shriveled. She estimates she’s lost 70% of her brainpower to the Digital Distraction Era. So yes—same life, dumber brain, higher rent. It’s a Nabokovian joke with a Billy Collins twist: Picnic, Lightning, but with Seamless orders and browser tabs.

    Like her earlier essay “The Broken-In World,” Daum doesn’t frame divorce as failure but as an act of radical return. Not regression—recognition. The performance is over. She’s stopped cosplaying as someone else’s version of a wife. The single life isn’t a punishment or a holding pattern—it’s her set point. The gravitational center she was orbiting all along.

    Coordinating a calendar with another adult, she admits, feels like a hostage negotiation. She loves living alone. She loves eating whatever she wants, whenever she wants, without anyone asking if they should defrost chicken. She can travel at the drop of a hat without shoving someone else’s life off balance. She’s not anti-love. She just refuses to bulldoze her rhythms for the sake of joint Costco runs.

    Post-divorce, she’s dated—kind, smart, well-meaning men—but none of them stood a chance against the one lover she can’t quit: solitude. She rarely goes on second dates. She doesn’t need romantic sabotage. She’s got peace and a dog. Who needs more?

    And let’s be clear: this position wasn’t won in a raffle. She fought for it. Marriage, divorce, reinvention. She earned this life through blood, paperwork, and self-inventory. She’s not about to crawl back into the foxhole of emotional compromise.

    Reading Daum, I’m reminded of a perfectly-cut line from Rodney Dangerfield: “You’re born a certain way and that’s it. You don’t change.” I think about that more than I should. At 63, I’m not all that different than I was at six. Moody, brooding one day. Goofy and loud the next. There’s a streak of isolato in me too. My family tolerates it. They let me take naps and skip amusement park trips that sound like air-conditioned nightmares.

    I’m probably not a perfect husband. But we make it work—me and this life. Me and my Daum-ian disposition. The marriage lasts, not because I’ve changed, but because we’ve all made our peace with who I am. And who I’ve always been.

  • Hot Pockets, CliffNotes, and the Death of Deep Reading

    Hot Pockets, CliffNotes, and the Death of Deep Reading

    Before the Internet turned my brain into a beige slush of browser tabs and dopamine spikes, I used to read like a man possessed. In the early ’90s, I’d lounge by the pool of my Southern California apartment, sun-blasted and half-glossed with SPF 8, reading books with a kind of sacred monastic intensity. A. Alvarez’s The Savage God. Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther. James Twitchell’s Carnival Culture. James Hillman and Michael Ventura’s rant against the therapy-industrial complex–We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse. Sometimes I’d interrupt the intellectual ecstasy to spritz my freshly tanned abs with water—because I was still vain, just literate.

    Reading back then was as natural as breathing. As Joshua Rothman points out in his New Yorker essay, “What’s Happening to Reading?”, there was a time when the written word was not merely consumed—it was inhaled. Books were companions. Anchors. Entire weekends were structured around chapters. But now? Reading is another tab, sandwiched between the news, a TikTok video of a dog on a skateboard, and an unopened Instacart order.

    Rothman nails the diagnosis. Reading used to be linear, immersive, and embodied—your hands on a book, your mind in a world. Now we shuttle between eBooks, PDFs, Reddit threads, and Kindle highlights like neurotic bees skimming data nectar. A “reading session” might include swiping through 200-word essays while eating a Hot Pocket and half-watching a documentary about narco penguins on Netflix. Our attention is fractured, our engagement ritualized but hollow. And yes, the statistics back it up: the percentage of Americans who read at least one book a year dropped from 55% to 48%. Not a cliff, but a slow, sad slide.

    Some argue it’s not worth panicking over—a mere 7% drop. I disagree. As a college instructor, I’ve seen the change up close. Students don’t read long-form books anymore. Assign Frederick Douglass and half the class will disappear into thin air—or worse, generate AI versions of Douglass quotes that never existed. Assign a “safe” book and they might skim the Wikipedia entry. We’ve entered an age where the bar for literacy is whether someone has read more than one captioned infographic per week.

    Rothman tries to be diplomatic. He argues that we’re not consuming less—we’re just consuming differently. Podcasts, YouTube explainers, TikTok essayists—this is the new literacy. And fine. I live in that world, too. I mainline political podcasts like they’re anti-anxiety meds. Most books, especially in the nonfiction space, do feel like padded TED Talks that should have stayed 4,000 words long. The first chapter dazzles; the next nine are a remix of the thesis until you feel gaslit into thinking you’re the problem.

    But now the reading apocalypse has a new beast in the basement: AI.

    We’ve entered the uncanny phase where the reader might be an algorithm, the author might be synthetic, and the glowing recommendation comes not from your friend but from a language model tuned to your neuroses. AI is now both the reader and the reviewer, compressing thousand-page tomes into bullet points so we can decide whether to fake-read them for a book club we no longer attend.

    Picture this: you’re a podcaster interviewing the author of a 600-page brick of a book. You’ve read the first 20 pages, tops. You ask your AI: “Give me a 5-page summary and 10 questions that make me sound like a tortured genius.” Boom—you’re suddenly a better interviewer than if you’d actually read the book. AI becomes your memory, your ghostwriter, your stand-in intelligence. And with every assist, your own reading muscles atrophy. You become fit only for blurbs and bar graphs.

    Or take this scenario: you’re a novelist. You’ve published 12 books. Eleven flopped. One became a cult hit. Your publisher, desperate for cash, wants six sequels. AI can generate them faster, better, and without your creative hand-wringing. You’re offered $5 million. Do you let the machine ghostwrite your legacy, or do you die on the sword of authenticity? Before you answer, consider how often we already outsource our thinking to tools. Consider how often you’ve read about a book rather than the book itself.

    Even the notion of a “writer” is dissolving. When I was in writing classes, names like Updike, Oates, Carver, and Roth loomed large—literary athletes who brawled on live television and feuded in magazines. Writers were gladiators of thought. Now they’re functionally obsolete in the eyes of the market, replaced by a system that values speed, virality, and AI-optimized titles.

    Soon, we won’t pick books. AI will pick them for us. It will scan our history, cross-reference our moods, and deliver pre-chewed summaries tailored to our emotional allergies. It will tell us what to read, what to think about it, and which hot takes to regurgitate over brunch. We’ll become readers in name only—participants in a kind of literary cosplay, where the act of reading is performed but never truly inhabited.

    Rothman’s essay is elegant, insightful, and wrong in one key respect: it shouldn’t be titled What’s Happening to Reading? It should be called What’s Happening to Reading, Writing, and the Human Mind? Because the page is still there—but the reader might not be.

  • How Losing 20 Pounds Made Me Rethink My Entire Watch Collection (and My Life)

    How Losing 20 Pounds Made Me Rethink My Entire Watch Collection (and My Life)

    Yesterday I filmed a 26-minute YouTube video on my main channel—ostensibly about watches. That was the bait. But somewhere between adjusting my camera and admiring my newly lean frame (twenty pounds down since April, thank you very much), I realized I wasn’t really talking about watches at all. I was talking about aging, restraint, identity, and how not to let your inner teenager run the damn show.

    The video was titled something like “My Four Watch Goals at Sixty-Four,” which sounds practical until you realize that my goals weren’t horological—they were existential. The first one? Stop being so maudlin. I actually said the word, spelled it out like a substitute teacher on a caffeine bender, and gave a definition. Maudlin: emotional excess masquerading as depth, the adolescent urge to turn life into performance art just so you can feel something.

    To illustrate, I offered up a formative trauma: being sixteen, watching Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk, and weeping—actually weeping—when he transformed into Lou Ferrigno’s green rage monster. It wasn’t just TV. It was catharsis. I was an Olympic weightlifter-slash-bodybuilder-slash-piano prodigy who didn’t know what to do with all the emotion I’d stuffed under my pecs and sonatas. Watching Bixby morph into a snarling demigod gave me permission to feel. In my forties, I channeled that same melodrama into wearing oversized diver watches—big, bold, and absurdly heroic, as if my wrist were auditioning for a Marvel reboot. That, too, was maudlin cosplay. Now I’m trying something radical: maturity.

    Goal two? Quit being an enabler. I admitted that, like it or not, I’m an influencer. I don’t collect in a vacuum. Every time I flex a new piece, it’s like handing out free permission slips to fellow addicts. So I’ve decided to use my powers for good—or at least for moderation.

    Goal three: Stay fit, get bloodwork, be a warrior in plain clothes. The watch isn’t the main course. It’s the garnish. If I’m going to wear something worth noticing, I should have the body and the biomarkers to back it up. Otherwise, I’m just a gilded potato.

    And finally, goal four: Minimalist watch heroes. The quiet monks of the community who own one to three watches and seem perfectly content. They’re my North Stars. They aren’t buying watches out of panic, nostalgia, or identity crises—they’re grounded, self-possessed, wise. I envy them. I aspire to be one of them. I’m not there yet, but I’m squinting in their direction.

    Honestly, I assumed the video would tank. My viewers tend to want horological eye-candy, not existential reflection wrapped in fitness updates. But to my surprise, the response was overwhelming—close to a thousand views on day one, dozens of comments. People thanked me. Some said they were booking doctor appointments. Others said they were starting diets. I’m fourteen years into making YouTube videos, and this might be the one I’m proudest of.

    Because the truth is, most watch YouTubers are just dressing up emotional poverty in brushed stainless steel. They get maudlin about bezels and bracelets, desperate to out-hype each other in a gaudy attention economy. It’s exhausting. What people really want—what they’re starving for—is someone speaking like a human being. No curation. No affectation.

    I ended my video with a confession: I’m still that sixteen-year-old kid. And if you cue up The Lonely Man theme from The Incredible Hulk, the one where David Banner walks down the rainy sidewalk in soft focus, I will—without shame—start crying. Again. Because some emotions don’t age. They just find quieter places to hide.

  • Bottom-Trawling and Other Sins That Ruin My Appetite

    Bottom-Trawling and Other Sins That Ruin My Appetite

    Watching a David Attenborough documentary feels less like casual viewing and more like sliding into the pew for the Church of Planet Earth. The man’s diction alone could resurrect the dead—each syllable polished, each pause wielded like a scalpel—while he preaches an all-natural gospel: paradise isn’t some vaporous hereafter; it’s right here, pulsing under our sneakers. And we, the congregation of carbon footprints, are the sinners. We bulldoze forests, mainline fossil fuels, and still have the gall to call ourselves stewards. His sermons don’t merely entertain; they indict. Ten minutes in and I’m itching to mulch my own receipts and swear off cheeseburgers for life.

    I’ve basked in Attenborough’s velvet reprimands for decades, often drifting into a blissful half-sleep as he murmurs about the “delicate balance of nature” and the tender devotion of a mother panda—as soothing as chamomile tea and twice as guilt-inducing. His newest homily, Ocean on Hulu, finds the maestro wide-eyed as ever, a silver-haired Burl Ives guiding us through Rudolph’s wilderness—only this time the Abominable Snowman is industrial bottom trawling. Picture a gargantuan steel mouth dragging across the seabed, gulping everything in its path. Rays flutter, fish scatter, and then—slam—the net’s iron curtain drops. Most of the hapless catch is unceremoniously dumped, lifeless, back into the brine.

    The footage left me queasy, a queasiness only partly soothed by Attenborough’s grandfatherly timbre. I’ve already been flirting with a plant-forward diet; Ocean shoved me into a full-blown breakup with seafood. Good luck unseeing hundreds of doomed creatures funneled into a floating abattoir while an octogenarian sage explains—as gently as one can—that we’re devouring our own Eden.

    So yes, I’ll skip the shrimp cocktail, thanks. My conscience already has acid reflux.

  • Be a Poor Speaker at Your Own Peril

    Be a Poor Speaker at Your Own Peril

    On the latest Dishcast, Andrew Sullivan interviewed the ever-cantankerous Chris Matthews—nearly 80 and still sharp enough to cut glass. Matthews, with his gravelly baritone steeped in decades of political brawls, made a blunt but brilliant point: the failed American presidents—Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden—shared one glaring flaw. They couldn’t talk. They mumbled, stumbled, or sounded like nervous librarians scolding kids in the back row.

    Now contrast that with the great performers of the Oval Office—Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama. Each could command a room, a camera, or a nation, not because they had better policies, but because they could speak. Kennedy practiced endlessly, even in the bathtub, channeling Churchill’s thunderous cadence while scrubbing his armpits. Reagan rehearsed like an actor because—well, he was one. Matthews’ thesis? If you’re a politician and can’t speak, you’re in the wrong line of work. There’s no excuse. Oratory is not some divine gift—it’s a muscle, and you’d damn well better train it.

    I couldn’t agree more. In my forty years teaching college students, my most potent teaching tool wasn’t my syllabus or my grading rubric—it was my voice. My persona. My ability to perform indignation, irony, sarcasm, and revelation—all in the same breath. I played a character: part prophet, part stand-up comic, part disappointed parent watching the nation stick a fork in the toaster. And that outraged character got through to students. It entertained while it educated. It gave ideas a delivery system my students could remember.

    So when I watch politicians stumble through speeches like deer on roller skates, I want to scream. You are leading a country. You should not sound like a sedated hostage reading a ransom note. At their worst, some of these men sound like toddlers in a supermarket, lost and wailing, unable to pronounce the word “mommy.” And yet they expect to run a superpower.

    Chris Matthews is right: if you can’t speak, you can’t lead.

  • Writing Your Origin Story: A College Essay Prompt

    Writing Your Origin Story: A College Essay Prompt

    Writing Your Origin Story

    An origin story is a personal narrative that explains how someone became who they are—it connects formative experiences, struggles, and turning points to a clear sense of identity and purpose. It’s not just a chronology of events, but a curated account that gives meaning to the chaos, shaping pain, failure, or rebellion into insight and direction. Like a myth with teeth, a well-crafted origin story turns vulnerability into vision, showing not just where someone came from, but how that journey forged their voice, values, and ambitions.

    We have powerful examples of origin stories In the Amazon Prime documentary Group Therapy, in which Neil Patrick Harris plays a surprisingly restrained version of himself as moderator while six comedians—Tig Notaro, Nicole Byer, Mike Birbiglia, London Hughes, Atsuko Okatsuka, and Gary Gulman—dissect the raw material of their lives. The big reveal? That material doesn’t go from trauma to stage in one dramatic leap. No, it must be fermented, filtered, and fashioned into something more useful than pain: a persona built on an origin story.

    Mike Birbiglia delivers the central thesis of the show, and I’ll paraphrase with a bit more bite: You can’t stagger onto stage mid-breakdown and expect catharsis to double as comedy. That’s not a gift—it’s a demand. You’re taking from the audience, not offering them anything. The real craft lies in the slow, deliberate process of transforming suffering into something elegant, pointed, and—yes—entertaining. That means the comic must achieve emotional distance from the wreckage, construct a precise point of view, and build a persona strong enough to carry the weight without buckling. In other words, the chaos must be curated. Unlike therapy, where you’re still bleeding onto the couch, stand-up demands a version of you that knows how to make the bloodstains rhyme.

    This process is a perfect metaphor for what college students must do, whether they realize it or not. They’re not just acquiring credentials—they’re building selves by having a clear grasp of their origin story. And that takes more than GPAs and LinkedIn bios. An origin story requires language, history, personal narrative, and a working origin myth that turns their emotional baggage into emotional architecture. And yes, it sounds crass, but the result is a kind of “self-brand”—an identity with coherence, voice, and purpose, forged from pain but presented with polish.

    Because your success, as a human being and someone who is creative and productive in the workforce, requires an origin story, you will write your first essay about the origin story–what it is, how it develops in others, and how it develops inside of you. 

    To explore the origin story in detail, you will write an essay in 3 parts. Part 1 will analyze the importance of an origin story in the Amazon Prime documentary Group Therapy. Your job in Part 1 is to write a two-page extended definition of the origin story based on the hard-fought wisdom of the comedians who pour out their souls and explain how through their suffering, they discovered who they are, what makes them tick, and how their origin story informs their comedy. 

    In Part 2, you will write a two-page analysis of the origin story by choosing one of four media sources: 

    1. The Amazon Prime 3-part series Evolution of the Black Quarterback, a meditation on the courage of black quarterbacks who broke racial barriers and built a legacy of social justice for those quarterbacks who came after them. 
    2. Chef’s Table, Pizza, Season 1, Episode 3, Ann Kim, the origin story of a Korean-American whose origin story led her to become an award-winning chef. 
    3. Chef’s Table, Noodles, Season 1, Episode 1, Evan Funke, an American who goes to Italy where kind Italian women share their cooking so he can preserve traditional Italian noodles and become a true chef.
    4. Chef’s Table, Noodles, Season 1, Episode 2, Guirong Wei, a young woman leaves China to work in London to support her family and emerges as a noodle star. 

    In Part 3, you will write your two-page origin story. Taking the lessons from Group Therapy and the other media sources from the choices above, you will have the context to write about how you conceive yourself, your interests, your unique challenges, your unique doubts, your career goals, and your aspirations as part of your origin story. 

    Your essay should be written in MLA format and have a Works Cited page with a minimum of the 2 assigned media sources.  

    The 10 Characteristics of Your Origin Story

    1. You recognize your challenge to belong and understand why you don’t fit in with conventional notions of success, friendship, family, and belonging.
    2. You recognize your quirks, fears, and traits that make it a challenge for you to belong.
    3. You recognize the barriers between you and what you want. 
    4. You recognize what you want instead of chasing what you think others would have you want.
    5. You recognize being lost in a fog and having a moment or a series of moments in which you achieved clarity regarding what you wanted as a career, for your relationships, and for your passions. 
    6. You find a North Star, a higher goal, that pulls you from a life of lethargy and malaise to one of discipline and purpose. 
    7. You recognize the demons that you have to contend with if you are to rise above your worst tendencies and achieve happiness and success.
    8. You recognize the talents, inclinations, preferences, style, and biases that make you the person that you are, and you learn to embrace these things and allow them to inform and give expression to the kind of work that you do.
    9. You prove to your doubters that the path you have taken is the assertion of your true self and is the most likely path to happiness and success.
    10. You recognize mentors and role models who blaze a path that makes you see yourself more clearly and live in accordance with your aspirational self. 
  • Old Money, New Misery: My Southern Charm Obsession

    Old Money, New Misery: My Southern Charm Obsession

    Yes, I’m hooked—addicted, really—to Southern Charm, Bravo’s televised safari through Charlotte, South Carolina’s aristocratic swamp of ennui, vanity, and monogrammed dysfunction. Most of the men are local fixtures: old money, old habits, old egos. They drift through their curated lives like shirtless Gatsby extras, tumbling into affairs, start-up flops, and half-baked rebrands of their own manhood—usually involving whiskey, dubious real estate ventures, and “branding consultants” who charge $8,000 to tell them to get a podcast. They aren’t villains exactly—there’s a flicker of decency beneath the smugness—but they are prone to recreational cruelty. Boredom gives their mischief a sadistic edge. Monogamy is a punchline. Direction is a punch-drunk memory. They’re trapped in a gilded cage of their own entitlement, slouching toward irrelevance with cocktails in hand. For the most part, they are a cast of man-child babies performing businessman cosplay.

    The women, in contrast, seem genetically engineered for composure, ambition, and unearned patience. While the men unravel like overpriced cable-knit sweaters, the women balance jobs, goals, and the emotional labor of pretending to be intrigued by yet another man-child’s whiskey brand. They hold the show together. They’re smarter, sharper, and infinitely more emotionally competent. Frankly, they deserve their own spin-off where they leave the men behind and conquer the Southeast in blazers and heels.

    And presiding over this high-society soap opera like a Southern Sphinx is Grand Matriarch Patricia. She doesn’t walk—she presides. Draped in silk and judgment, she rules from her settee with a cocktail in one hand and a butler at her heels. Her hobbies include throwing theme parties for her yapping purse-dogs, matchmaking with surgical precision, and purchasing $30,000 gold elephants out of sheer boredom. She’s not a character; she’s a living monument to genteel tyranny. Watching her is like watching Downton Abbey if it were sponsored by bourbon and Botox.

    Honestly? The show makes me want to move to Charlotte. The humid rain gives me Florida flashbacks. The homes are plush, the restaurants look sinfully inviting, and every time I watch Southern Charm, I find myself daydreaming of strolling through the city in linen pants, pretending I too have nothing better to do than flirt, sip, and emotionally combust in a well-upholstered room.