In the summer of 2007, my job was an early casualty of the bubbling financial crisis. That fall, I sprayed different resumes to the far corners of the professional world hoping my bullet points got me in the door, but also hoping no one poked on them since each new…

“Live an interesting life. No one wants to talk to an old man with no stories to tell.” My grandfather’s advice for me as a teenager landed well as I’ve tinkered and trekked my way through several careers, but the call to do the unexpected thing doesn’t just pay returns…

As the story goes with pregnancy, you’ll hear couples say, “One day we were just living our lives, and the next we had a baby!” This is true. One day there were two, and then there were three. With surrogacy (and adoption), the all-of-a-sudden feeling is even more pronounced because…

It’s 3PM. You and a colleague are sitting next to each other when your boss comes in and asks, “Hey, do one of you have the bandwidth to help me?” In the time it takes for a glance and an elongated, “Ummm — ,” each of you weighs office culture…

My wife and I got married in April 2017 when we were both 36; an age that still felt young in the elongated youth of 21st century norms. But no “40 is the new 30” slogan was going to hide the fact that we were in the dusk of our…

My wife has hijacked a mantra I say to myself before doing something uncomfortable. “Mongol Rally.” Conjuring up the memory of the almost 10,000-mile journey reminds me that — whatever I’m currently facing — I’ve done hard things. I will get through this. I say she hijacked it because while…

“I would move to Amsterdam in a heartbeat if I could,” grumbled the checkout lady at Whole Foods as she whipped a paper bag into shape. “Every shopper has to bag their own items there. In fact, it’s illegal for staff to do anything.” This was the tail end of…

One month in. Now’s about the time where a lot of us are hanging on to the ledge of our new year’s resolutions while the antagonist in our story (who, interestingly enough, is also us) is standing on our fingers hoping we’ll let go. How did this happen? Just four…

My “Top 10 Books I Read This Year” post in 2021 was one of my most popular, so I thought I’d bring back the list for this year’s reads (in no particular order). The 16 books that didn’t make the list are at the end of this post, including my…