Out Now!
I had the great privilege to be interviewed and featured in a new Rebel Girls book, “Rebel Girls Build the Future,” in partnership with Meta. You can order your favorite Rebel’s copy now!
Essays
Out Now!
I had the great privilege to be interviewed and featured in a new Rebel Girls book, “Rebel Girls Build the Future,” in partnership with Meta. You can order your favorite Rebel’s copy now!
But COVID came, sequestering me in a 1,164sq. ft. apartment where if I have a reason to get up from my computer twice a day it’s a field day, and now my Fitbit yells at me every hour on the hour and I’ve started to yell back.
Writing is, and has always been, incredibly personal for me. In its most fundamental role, it is the tool I use to sort through the barrage of thoughts and abstractions in hopes of uncovering purpose in the chaos of living. I need writing like I need rest. In 2018, I haven’t had much of either.
When I was tasked with writing a letter to you, to be delivered on the day before your graduation from college, it was probably implied that this letter, from ten years in the future, was supposed to be generally optimistic and filled with ‘go get ‘ems’ - or at least a couple ‘it gets betters.’ I was probably supposed to reflect fondly on the last ten years and summarize them in a way that felt encouraging and supportive, maybe even aspirational.
Every so often, my friend and I meet up at a bar, drink steadily for a few hours, spend the first bit catching up, and the rest of the time, read: the majority of the time, discussing things we find unsatisfactory or generally displeasing.
I was determined, for a reason still unknown to me, to get the cake out and the icing on while both were still warm, as per the instructions. And so I flipped the cake upside down, gave it a loud rap on the countertop, and right as Alice, my roommate, the person who had told me repeatedly to wait for it to cool more, walked out of her bedroom, I knew I had made a terrible mistake.
When I fell into the wacky world of advertising, I was pretty sure I knew everything I needed to know about what made a good ad. Then again, I bet most of us who have seen more than a single season of Mad Men are pretty sure we understand advertising...
When you first start working, a stack of paper money is one of the most gratifying feelings in the world. I can’t say I ever had a moment though, while watching various monetary denominations pile up in my sock drawer, that I wondered where all my girls were at.
The Internet community is the Jurassic Park of our society. Both manmade inventions which began as really cool theories executed with enthusiasm and precision, and they were complete disasters from the start. Just like Jurassic Park couldn’t defeat the senselessness of the “let’s ride a stegosaurs to safety” mindset, the Internet cannot eliminate the less desirable traits of its users in a rapidly developing environment.
There was light enough to see the contours of the three-dimensional map splayed across the large table in front of them, and light enough to see the others’ faces, but not enough for details, which was probably all for the best. Not a single one of them looked great in the afterlife, not even him. No, Robb Stark had to admit, being dead is not a great color on me.
When I outlined this article several weeks ago, I envisioned a straight-line correlation between gender bias and the lack of female representation in STEM-related industries and STEM education. I will even admit that I tailored my questions to guide my interviewees down this path.
How did our definition of the term become so… wonky? To me, feminism is pretty straightforward: it is the belief that men and women, as human people, are equal. But as I tabbed through the articles and blogs and websites dedicated to the issue, my brain started to reach a core-meltdown level of boiling.
A couple years ago, I had an interview with a live sound production company...I prepared for every possible standard interviewer-interviewee conversation. Of course, that feeling quickly faded when the hiring manager sat back in his chair, sighed at my resume with a shake of his head, and said, “I don’t know – I think you might be too attractive to work here.”