Listen up, millennials! — Gather around the campfire, young’uns. Let me tell you a spooky story about members of the ancient tribe known as the landline natives. When I was 3, my family moved from the city of Buffalo to a rambler in a new suburban subdivision, a house built by my mother’s brother…

Don’t let what you might do blind you to what you’ve already done — I’m mesmerized watching Eva Kalien’s reels of her mixed media sketches, but inevitably I want her to have stopped way sooner than she does. I am drawn to some of Eva Kitok’s early embroidery work, where parts of the composition are outlined with stitch, but otherwise incomplete. …

Your favorite work can tell you a lot about your next step. — In July, I will celebrate 25 years of working as a designer. Like many folks, the pandemic has prompted me to take a look back on my career and a look forward to the future. What pieces spark joy at having done them, and what does that tell me? Over…

A lesson from Mom — Note: My mother passed away March 26, 2001. This is a memoir-as-letter to her. I never told you about the sit-in I staged at the baseball diamond. But I was following in your footsteps. Or, more accurately, foot stops. I remember hearing the story of the time you staged a…

That way, I can lead a more exciting lifestyle — I don’t have any good medical issues. By good, I mean ones that if I had them, I could take one of those fancy new drugs with Qs and Zs in their name and be leading a much less generic life. The names are like some haiku gone wild: Ozempic…

How my social media experience has morphed since 2008. — I might be one of the few people who joined Twitter and Facebook to have something to list in my goals during an annual performance review. That may sound odd, but at the time, I was working as a web designer at a university research center and Twitter had just…

A Pulitzer Prize in Journalism is waiting for someone brave enough to tell the story.

I escaped a petty micromanager and saved my mental health — For most of my adult life, I’ve had blood pressure on the lower side: 100/70. Until the day that my boss, *Kathy, sent me over the edge. I still remember being on the phone with my best friend at the time, circa 2013, sitting on my couch, the sun shining…

A trip down memory lane, and a test of chatGPT — I had a seven-year run as a print graphic designer starting in the late 1990s, in the adolescence of “desktop publishing,” following three semesters of coursework in graphic design. When I started, I knew how to cut Rubylith to create color separations. I inhaled enough rubber cement fumes to kill…