I’ve never had much to write about sex. Call it prudishness, call it the last remaining shreds of a desire for privacy, but I’ve always operated from the default setting that nothing I had to say on the matter was all that interesting. We all have sex, we all like it, we all allow it […]

I can be reasonably tough . I didn’t shed a tear when I broke off the corner of my elbow in 7th grade or when my lower back decided to spontaneously decombust, I have no qualms about telling the jerk at the bar to stop calling me “sweetie,” and I’ll look a burly deliveryman in […]

This piece also appeared in The Huffington Post.
Last week, I had a forced identity crisis. As it did for plenty of other women/writers/people who consume far too much media, Emily Gould’s infamous cover story and the resulting maelstrom sat in my thoughts, roiling and churning until the inside of my head looked like something envisioned […]

I’m getting used to being totally at the whim of my emotions. They’re running the show at the moment, the autocrats dictating how I’ll experience life from one day to the next. Wake up on a weekday morning — I’m alone, but in a now-familiar place, sunlight streaming in, everything’s fine. Shower, eat breakfast, walk […]

I can’t make up my mind about whether unhappiness is a fundamentally lonely or social experience. On the one hand, it’s the most collective of all human emotions, the one true commonality. No matter who we are, how we grew up, or where we live on the planet, we’re all susceptible to the same fears, […]

We tend to do things for reasons. We need to pay the bills, so we go to work. We need sustenance, so we hit Dunkin Donuts in the morning. We want to keep our jobs, so we sneak in up the freight elevator and through the back hall when we’re running late.
In fact, when […]

I’m great at developing relationships in my life. Most of them are meaningful, involved, and require a lot of time and effort. Granted, they aren’t all with actual human beings, but that’s somewhat beside the point.
Take Cat, for example. We have a complex and dynamic bond, mostly consisting of her making her needs known […]

There’s something deeply flawed about Valentine’s Day. It’s surprising, given that we’re talking about an entire holiday devoted to having fun with someone you find attractive, consuming decadent food and alcohol, exchanging cards, gifts, and statements of devotion, and, in all likelihood, getting laid. From that perspective, the idea that a ritual like this could […]

New Yorkers aren’t the happiest bunch. For any number of reasons (working too much, subsisting on mercury-laden tuna, living in $3,000-a-month concrete boxes surrounded by two thousand other concrete boxes at even more laughable prices) those who chose to live here don’t tend to be the happy-go-lucky type.
In a way, it’s a matter of […]

I’m not smart every day. Or even 85% of days. I’d lay the odds at around 5/6ths. Maybe that’s being generous.
I’ve learned to accept this, after countless mornings spent poring through WebMD to see if there’s some way my brain cells could have evaporated overnight. Writers love to flounder in self-created dramas about “the […]