Posting a brag, humble or otherwise, and then waiting for people to respond is the equivalent of having a conversation in which all you do is wait for your turn to speak.
— Meghan Daum
Other dogs may do their jobs in their own unique and perfectly wonderful ways, but there will always be that dog that no dog will replace, the dog that will make you cry even when it's been gone for more years than it could ever have lived.
The search for happiness has long been a dominant feature of American life. It's a byproduct of prosperity, not to mention the most famous line in the Declaration of Independence.
Air travelers, of course, are famous for their hubris. They carry on too many bags and use the restroom when the seat-belt sign is on.
For my part, if I'm working while flying, I'm often a bit relieved to be forced to shut down the computer on final descent. But I guess I'm a slacker.
When I made my final reckoning with the decision not to have kids, I also decided that I would use at least some of my extra time to better the lives of kids who are already here.
People have always taken photos of themselves, either with camera timers or by handing their Nikons over to strangers in foreign countries and then paying large sums to get them back.
Being taken down a few pegs is humbling. Knowing that life is not easy or fair is humbling. Receiving a great honor - well, that would be called an honor.
Mother's Day, like motherhood itself, is fraught with peril. There are so many ways to get it wrong, so many opportunities to disappoint and be disappointed.
Of the countless ways to feel old in your 40s, perhaps none is quite as perplexing as seeing a young person trendily decked out in 1980s-style garb and saying to yourself, 'I can't believe that look is back in style. It was bad enough the first time around!'
The truth is that most of your Facebook friends are too busy counting their own 'likes' to pay attention to you for more than a few seconds anyway. Unless you happen to be a kitten who's in love with a baby goat, in which case you should hire a publicist immediately.
Social media, despite its reputation as the ultimate agent of self-promotion, actually feeds on self-loathing.
Before digital and mobile communications effectively tethered us to an invisible, infinite 'wire,' even those with the most hectic schedules were usually willing to answer the phone if they happened to be home when it rang.
Each year, in my quaint efforts to send out paper holiday cards with personal messages, I probably discard one for every three I actually manage to put in the mail. The reason is that my handwriting is now less legible than it was when I was in the second grade.
I have a distinct memory, dating back to 1989 or so, of sitting around with my college dorm mates talking about a new term that was popping up everywhere: 'political correctness.'
Self-esteem, the kind that comes from finding the sweet spot between a healthy fondness for yourself and healthy self-skepticism, tends to get harder to come by the older we get.
In the world of opinion writing, there's something called the 'to be sure' paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point.
If something good happens to you, and no one knows it, did it really happen? Moreover, if you don't publicize your accomplishments and good fortune, are you essentially saying you don't care about them?
There's a particular kind of single woman whose relationship with her dog has a level of intensity and affection that may be both the cause and the result of her singleness. For a long time, I was that woman.
In a world of oversharing, we don't want to be unknown or unseen. We don't want to be left out.
Checking email every 45 seconds is not only compulsive, it's presumptuous. It suggests a belief that anyone who sends us a message needs us to read it immediately, even if the message is from SkyMall telling us our Bigfoot Garden Yeti statue has shipped.
It may take a village to raise a child, but not every villager needs to be a mom or dad. Some of us just need to be who we are.
I was just 13 when 'The Big Chill' was released in late September 1983, so I didn't catch all of its nuances when I sneaked into the theater to see it. But I could tell one thing for sure: These people were grown-ups.
To be honored by success is to take your life seriously. To humble-talk about it is to take yourself seriously.
Like a physically beautiful but otherwise rather dull person who trades on his or her looks, Southern California swings perpetually between a profound inferiority complex and an equally profound sense of entitlement.
We're not handed situations based on our established likes and dislikes; we get what's available.
L.A. is a constellation of microclimates and microcosms, a library with dozens of special collections. A 20-minute drive can bring a temperature change of 15 degrees. Crossing an intersection can feel like crossing a national border.
Choose what you actually want to do rather than what you think will impress people on Facebook. Ironically, when you do this, something amazing happens; what you produce stands a better chance of getting recognition. Not just on Facebook, but in the real world.
The reason it was so bruising when someone said I was from a rich family is that, like many of us, I'm deeply invested - probably overly so - in the myth of my own self-creation. I like to believe that I got where I am, such as it is, by working hard and charting my own course.
Old-fashioned girl that I am, I still have a landline, though it rarely rings - and when it does, especially without warning, there's rarely anything good on the other end.
Few targets of ridicule are as easy to hit as owners and handlers of competitive show dogs.
Self-righteousness, when you think about it, is a contra-indicator of self-esteem. It's what sets in when genuine righteousness eludes us.
My goal is to invite readers to think along with me and draw their own conclusions.
Just as I never liked bumper stickers - even though I do brake for animals, and if I had a kid, she would definitely be an honor student - I don't like the idea of expressing my views through social-media-controlled rainbow-or-anything-else-ification.
When I talk to students or young writers about the importance of being unafraid to take controversial positions, I'm struck by the degree to which they can't entertain a thought, much less commit one to paper, without imagining the cacophony of snark they'll get in response.
You don't realize how much a dog's presence defines the contours of your home until, in its absence, the walls seem to relocate themselves.
We don't want privacy so much as privacy settings.
We use our gadgets for distraction and entertainment. We use them to avoid work while giving the impression that we're actually working hard.
It's great that Time is moving in the direction of validating those who, by choice or circumstance, will never be parents. But the point is not simply that society should stop judging those of us who don't have children. It's that society actually needs us. Children need us.
Much of the magic of language, of course, lies in its fluidity.
The right way to win is to recognize that winning isn't the end game, but rather the beginning of new opportunities - maybe even opportunities to help other people win.
Almost nothing is more tedious than complaining about the weather.
Let's face it: every campus has its share of students who can't quite comprehend that extreme political correctness is often born of the same intolerance and anti-intellectualism as standard-issue bigotry.
Not everyone in Santa Monica is a well-heeled, juice-cleansing, Prius-driving yogini, but for better or worse, that is the city's dominant chord.
Quitting Facebook would be like partially erasing myself. Quitting Twitter would constitute further erasure. Pretty soon, I'd be invisible. I was never on Instagram or Tumblr, which I guess means I never completely existed in the first place.
If you must know, my parents came from pretty hardscrabble backgrounds in the southern Midwest. I certainly didn't grow up poor, but I did spend my 20s and early 30s juggling temp jobs and choking on massive student-loan debt.
Handwriting challenges aside, I love paper cards. I love the endless stewing involved in picking them out at the store. I love buying holiday stamps at the post office, and I love that 'whoosh' sound the cards make when I drop them into the mail slot.
As with 'feminism,' not to mention 'liberalism' and 'conservatism,' 'political correctness' tends to mean what you want it to mean, which also pretty much amounts to utter meaninglessness.
For a kid, self-esteem can be as close at hand as a sports victory or a sense of belonging in a peer group. It's a much more complicated and elusive proposition for adults, subject to the responsibilities and vicissitudes of grown-up life.
As humans with egos and feelings, none of us wants to be pilloried. But as thinkers and writers, it's our job to express opinions forthrightly and without qualifying them out of existence.
