Confessions of a Brainwork Addict
brainwork – mental activity or effort, especially as opposed to physical labor. To this day, my brain constantly itches. Daily I suffer from the unbearable boredom of not being challenged enough. I imagine it’s the same sort of itch that plagued Sherlock Holmes whenever he wasn’t solving a murder or deciphering a cryptic note. As […]
How Society Has Normalized Bullying
A society that normalizes bullying is no society at all.But here we are, in the grand age of progress, where we’ve apparently decided that bullying suddenly isn’t that big of a problem—it’s just an edgy personality trait for future leaders of our nations. It’s as if we took all those anti-bullying campaigns from the early […]
Why I Don’t Subscribe to Political Parties
Back in 2006, in my hometown of Brockton, Massachusetts, I found myself eligible to vote in my first-ever election. Like every freshly minted voter, I was armed with enthusiasm, a naive sense of civic duty, and a boatload of confusion. I was ready to storm the polls and make my mark on the American democratic […]
To Be a Shaker
If my life story were to be published as a paperback novel, it would unfold as an epic tale of drama, strife, and an endless struggle to survive. It would unfold as a riveting saga filled with triumphs, heartbreaks, and an uncanny ability to trip over my own feet at the most inopportune moments. Even […]
How I Became a Master of Recognizing Patterns
Growing up, I always had this unsettling knack for knowing things I shouldn’t. It wasn’t in the psychic sense, though; I couldn’t predict lottery numbers or horse race outcomes, I’m afraid. I just had a way of knowing when someone was about to feed me a load of crap. Some might call it intuition; I […]
From Print to Pixels: A Snarky Retrospective on the Decline of Sports Writing
Back in 2003, when I was a starry-eyed high school junior with delusions of grandeur about journalism, I wrote a research paper on sports writing. To my naive self, sports journalism was the ultimate gig: a way to capture the raw thrill of the game, the drama, and all those riveting details that keep fans […]
The Follies of Eating Nothing but Take Out
There comes a point in every adult’s life when you take a long, hard look at your dining habits and think, “How did I get here?” For some, it’s when they’re scraping the bottom of yet another greasy takeout container at 2 a.m., wondering if that lingering heartburn is their body’s polite way of saying, […]
How Becoming a Better Editor Made Me a Better Writer
Since the 2020 pandemic, my primary focus in my life was to make the best of my writing archives. As of September 2022, however, my focus has shifted slightly: make my writing archives better. This is, in fact, a very straightforward process. Find the posts that used to get love and improve them, then find […]
Before You Become a Great Writer, You Must Write Badly
When I was growing up in the nineties, grunge was king, the internet made a noise like a dying robot when it connected, and people weren’t afraid to tell you the hard, sometimes brutal truth. I miss that brutal honesty the most. Back then, getting to the top of your class involved being really bad […]