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I’ll admit it. I try to be easy. Being easy is, I think, one of the most underrated qualities a person can have. Before anyone gets excited, I mean being easy to be around. There are people who somehow make ordinary life feel heavier than it needs to be. Choosing a restaurant becomes a negotiation.

Transactional. There is an assumption buried inside that word when it comes to intimacy. When money is involved, the connection must somehow be less genuine. The warmth is part of the service. The affection is an act. The enjoyment is manufactured. Payment, apparently, has the magical ability to cancel sincerity. Except we don’t apply that

I have a theory about men. They don’t read. Now, before anyone gets offended, I realize this is a sweeping generalization, and there are undoubtedly millions of men wandering around out there reading things at this very moment. Books. Newspapers. Instruction manuals. Emails. Possibly even this blog. 🙃 Although, if my theory is correct, a

I moved to Texas from Hawaii just before my freshman year of high school, and talk about culture shock. There were plenty of things I didn’t understand about my new home, but one of the strangest had to be the homecoming mum. The first time I saw one, I genuinely thought it looked like something

I was recently trying to beat the Texas heat by hopping into the pool with a cold popsicle when I caught myself giggling at how much I felt like a kid again. Then, almost immediately, a Katy Perry song popped into my head. You probably know the one. It involved California girls, summer heat, and

“Fall” is approaching in Texas, which means it was 99 degrees outside today. Technically, September has arrived. Somewhere, people are pulling sweaters out of storage, drinking pumpkin spice lattes, and decorating their front porches with adorable little pumpkins. Here in Texas, I’m still getting into the swimming pool because it’s too damn hot to sit

Every once in a while, I receive a message that makes me stop, stare at my phone, and wonder exactly what series of decisions led us here. Recently, I received one of those messages.  It wasn’t a normal introduction. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even the garden-variety inappropriate message that occasionally wanders into my

There is a strange thing we sometimes do when something good comes to an end. We go back and reevaluate the whole thing. If it didn’t last, maybe it wasn’t what we thought it was. If we lost it, maybe we were foolish for becoming so attached to it. If the ending hurt enough, maybe

There is a tax we sometimes pay without ever realizing we’ve been charged. I like to call it the asshole tax. I recently had an interaction with someone who was clearly an expert at racking up this particular surcharge, and it didn’t take long for me to understand how he’d earned this expertise.  When I

I recently listened to an episode of the podcast Criminal called “A Bump in the Night and Unexpected Guests.” I say “listened,” but most of the time podcasts are simply background noise while I work. I hear the words without necessarily absorbing them. Then the last story began with a woman who lived in Austin,