Traveling in Southeast Asia may sound like a dream for gluten-avoiders. All the rice! And rice noodles! But alas, there is one major stumbling block to GF dining: Soy sauce, made from wheat, in a travesty of inaccurate branding. Sadly, many Asian dishes are cooked with soy sauce, and requesting tamari as a substitute is…
Free to be, you and me
Why be normal? That was a bumper sticker you’d see on the back of VW Rabbits in the early 1980s. But my mom, P’Tricia, knew that wasn’t even the right question. There’s no such thing as normal, she told me, over and over. The heteronormative nuclear family wasn’t “normal,” in her eyes. It was toxic….
Do you (have to) love your job?
As a GenX-er, I was raised in the era of “You can do anything! As long as you get a job.” Get a job, any job at all. If you enjoy it, that’s the icing on the cake. But don’t expect to like it. Something happened after I became an adult, and a whole generation…
Do you have a plan?
How I went from a hot mess to an organized professional I used to scoff at goals, resolutions, and aspirations. Life, it seemed, was too full of random chaos. It’s what happens while you’re making other plans, right? There were big things in my childhood that were out of my control. My dad left. My…
How sexism stunted my career
I know workplace sexism is not over, but I also know that most millennial women I know have had to slog through less of it than previous generations. As a GenXer I am part of the last wave of women to come into their careers in the twentieth century. We were still dealing with the…
ChatGPT knows something I don’t
One thing I’ve noticed about my initial forays into generative AI is that these bots like to make stuff up. Not especially creative or interesting stuff, but rather fictional scenarios that could be true. I decided to try a little experiment and ask ChatGPT to write a short bio of myself based on nothing more…
Women who drink themselves to death
Last year, my cousin died unexpectedly. She was a first cousin I barely knew, who had never lived in my town and only rarely appeared at family gatherings. I think I met her two or three times, and by the time we were teens, I could already see she was on a different trajectory. She…
Am I “healthy enough?”
Lifestyle choices can be fraught. When it comes to healthy or unhealthy living, our choices can fall anywhere on what seems to be a pretty massive scale. When you have elite athletes on one end and morbidly obese shut-ins on the other, it can be hard to assess what is “healthy enough.” I’m going to…
The new loneliness of the remote worker
I’m a fully remote human being. I’ve always been a bit remote from others. Ask any friend or family member and I’m sure they will tell you that even as I child I kept my distance. I never wanted to be too tied up in other peoples’ business. I kept myself to myself. And so…
Will you be my friend?
Will you be my friend? Just kidding, but not really. Something strange is happening to our collective social reality, and I think I need some help to figure out how to have friends. The research is clear. Those who feel socially isolated have dire health outcomes and chronic stress. Our bodies were evolved to be…
Plumb Wonderful 