pH Balance

It’s a humbling feeling. One day, you have it all together: your 7am yoga routine, your perfectly calibrated to-do list, your soundness of mind and body. And then something happens. Not anything serious like a freak tornado or assassination attempt, but something smaller, like a trip or a few days out with COVID-19. This seemingly…

“I just need a good way to kill someone,” I said, sitting in our friendly neighborhood Starbucks. My sister looked around and confirmed that everyone was too distracted with their phones and laptops to take notice. It’s always been a dream of mine to write a mystery novel. I was telling her about how my…

I’m a big fan of Scott Adams’s essay “The Day You Became A Better Writer”. It helped make my writing clearer. I think most people, at least those who write in English, would benefit from reading it. In all my years of peer-editing, I recognize that most people could improve their essay-writing skills considerably if…

Not really how to be sick, because everyone knows we don’t need any extra help contracting an illness during the fourth (fifth?) wave of a global pandemic. Rather, this post is more on how to be when sick. After two years of remaining covid-free during the pandemic, my body finally decided to capitulate to the…

I recently published my first article on Broke Ass Stuart. This blog entry is mostly stuff that didn’t make it on the final version of the article. I still wanted to share it, though. While you have to give up some of your original content when you write on other platforms, I can put whatever…

Non-sociopathic humans have gut feelings of right & wrong. Instinct is part of the human experience, even if it compels individuals to act in different ways. Sometimes we just know that something is wrong, but we can’t articulate why. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. It becomes a problem when we think we can build…

I wanted to submit the following piece to Clinch, but I was late by a day. They told me to maybe try again in June. I spent quite a bit of time on it, so I wanted to share it. It’s a semi-autobiographic (i.e. edited for clarity and humor) account of my introduction to martial…

This past Friday, we celebrated a birthday with pizzas and a fire pit. I met many new friends around the crackling embers that night. It turns out we were all in similar life boats after our social lives hit the COVID-19 iceberg. Many of us had similar stories of college-fueled extraversion turned to quarantine-necessitated introversion.…

I recently finished Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink. It’s a great book that explores the psychology of what, how, and why we eat. While I was reading this book, I was listening to Cal Newport’s most recent interview with Tim Ferriss. I couldn’t help but notice a parallel in these two seemingly disparate sources—and it’s…

In the beginning, there was a scrappy site coded from scratch. I was proud of it, but it wasn’t the best way to show my ideas to the world. It took too much time to code, and I wasn’t getting to do the creative work I wanted to do. So, I decided to make the…