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“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,

I experienced something new recently, and it was fascinating. I have always loved water. I am literally in my pool at least twice a day. Then I met an aquaphile. To be clear, I said aquaphile. When I first heard the word, my brain caught the ending before it processed the beginning, and it briefly

We all have a red-light district. Not necessarily a physical place, but a private corner of ourselves where we keep the things we would rather no one else see. The lies, the cruelty, the selfish decisions, and the moments we hope will remain safely hidden in the dark. But what if they did not stay

Words are strange things. They have no weight, take up no space, and can disappear almost as quickly as they are spoken. Yet a sentence that took someone five seconds to type can remain inside another person for years. The person who wrote it may not remember it at all. That is one of the

I thought adulthood would be about freedom. I would have my own house, make my own decisions, and eat cake for dinner if I wanted. All of that turned out to be true. What no one mentioned was that I would spend most of that freedom scheduling appointments, changing filters, buying replacement parts, and trying

Henley is our spirited not so little orange cat with an enormous and decidedly un-cat-like personality. He is the undisputed star of our home and, by a fairly wide margin, its most popular family member. He greets every visitor, appoints himself the sleeping companion of every overnight guest whether they like it or not, and