Words

  • I Made Engineers Sound Like Humans for Six Years: Different Context, Same Toolset

    My boss at the engineering firm had a joke he liked to make about my hiring. He was a P.E. — civil and environmental — and he used to say,… Read more

  • Every Tool Is A Faustian Bargain (Here is the one we’re currently making)

    Neil Postman argued in 1998 that every new technology arrives as a Faustian bargain. Not bad, exactly. Not good, exactly. A trade. Something is given; something is taken. And the… Read more

  • Guess Who’s Ready for the AI Slop?

    There is a question I have been hearing a lot lately, in various forms, from teachers trying to figure out how to work in an AI-saturated content environment: how do… Read more

  • Whistles, Bells, Coaches, and Me

    I want to tell you what ADD is actually good at, because most of the conversation about it goes in one of two directions — either it’s a superpower and… Read more

  • What I Decided To Give My Kids

    My daughter chose Margaret Mead for her biography museum project. She was ten. She stood at her poster in her white blouse and read aloud: ‘Never doubt that a thoughtful,… Read more

  • A Woman’s Shoes

    I wrote a paper about my mother when I was seventeen. It was for a Women’s Studies class — the kind of intro course that’s supposed to give you a… Read more

  • It Was Not Normal

    The realization doesn’t always arrive with fanfare. Sometimes it comes sideways, at an inconvenient time, in the middle of an argument you’ve had before and will probably have again. You’re… Read more

  • Learning To Be The Adult In My Mother’s Life

    There is a version of the mother-daughter relationship that the greeting cards cover well. Most relationships hit at least one of these baking-together, matching-clothed, finish-each-other’s-sentences stride at least in moments.… Read more

  • The Pattern Didn’t Start With You

    There’s a moment, if you’re paying attention, when you catch yourself doing something your mother did. The specific cadence of a criticism. A particular kind of silence. The way you… Read more

  • The ADD Tax

    There is a specific kind of cognitive overhead that comes with a brain like mine, and for a long time I just accepted it as the cost of doing business.… Read more

Who and What

Former teacher. Lifelong writer. Cultural anthropologist of my own life. Mixed content for people whose papers are also strewn about.

I’ve been sitting outside writing for as long as I can remember. I tried different things with an open mind at different stages of life and wrote notes, kept receipts, and have pictures to prove it.

This is where I put all of it: words, process, life, and whatever’s aging well. Overrated? Underrated? Curated and spell checked for damn sure.

The niche isn’t for me to limit myself down to. You’re here in the world I’ve long had in my mind.

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