B r a i n C l e a r

Sorting through life one thought at a time

Life, Lately…

  • Does the Bull Fit in the Barn?

    A friend of mine has a daughter heading into her final year of college. This daughter has had exactly one boyfriend the whole time. They got together a few months into freshman year and never really stopped.

    We got to talking about what comes next. The daughter wants a gap year before med school, and she and her boyfriend have floated the idea of getting a place together. He’s staying in school. No gap year for him.

    My friend wasn’t thrilled about the living-together part. Her worry: if her daughter moves in, he’ll have less reason to ever propose.

    I’ve been in the U.S. for years now. Long enough that I don’t expect much to catch me off guard anymore.

    And yet.

    There’s a specific flavor of surprise that only American dating logic can produce in me, and this was one of those moments.

    Come again?

    Because to me, the reasoning runs completely in reverse.

    It reminded me of that phrase people trot out here:

    “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

    I have thoughts.

    Starting with this one: since when is he the customer and she the livestock?

    And why does the saying assume she’s just standing at the fence, waiting to be deemed purchase-worthy?

    Where I’m from, nobody’s buying anybody.

    Both people are choosing.

    If we’re going to keep the barnyard metaphor alive, maybe it should go like this instead:

    Why would a woman commit to a bull before finding out if he even fits in her barn? 😂

    Moving in together was never supposed to be a bargaining chip, something she trades for the promise of a ring down the line.

    It’s just how two people figure out if a life together actually works.

    And honestly, this goes well beyond the roommate question.

    The longer I sat with it, the clearer it got. Sweden and the U.S. aren’t just doing dating differently. They’re starting from different premises entirely.

    To be fair, Sweden isn’t game-free. Some version of “don’t seem too eager” is probably universal. It’s been a while since I was in the dating pool back home, but I’d guess the instinct to play it cool hasn’t gone anywhere.

    Women in particular seem tasked with the same balancing act everywhere: be interested, just not too obviously.

    Sweden included. We’re not exempt.

    But the actual mechanics of dating feel less scripted there.

    Two people meet. They start spending time together. They sleep together.

    Or, honestly, they might sleep together first and the “spending time together” part follows. 😂

    Sequence aside, here’s the real difference: nobody typically has to schedule a sit-down conversation titled “So, are we exclusive?”

    Once you’re seeing someone regularly, exclusivity is the default setting. If that’s not the case if someone else is in the picture too that’s the part you actually have to bring up.

    I’ve got a much younger sister, which means I’ve watched Swedish dating unfold long after I aged out of it myself. What I’ve noticed is that when someone isn’t looking for anything serious, or wants things kept casual, that gets said out loud early, precisely so nobody ends up confused or hurt.

    The American version often runs the opposite direction.

    You can be dating, sleeping together, spending every weekend together, and somehow still need a formal check-in about whether either of you is doing that with anyone else, too.

    My Swedish nervous system finds this baffling.

    Then there’s the friends-and-family piece. In Sweden, meeting someone’s friend group isn’t loaded with meaning. Meeting the parents isn’t a milestone with a flashing sign over it either.

    Sometimes you’re just around, long before anyone would call you the girlfriend or the boyfriend.

    And that same casualness carries all the way through, right up to the question that kicked off this whole train of thought: marriage.

    The old cow saying isn’t really about timing. It’s about the fear of never getting picked at all about being the one left standing at the fence while somebody else decides if you’re worth the commitment.

    I’m sure that fear exists in Sweden too. People are people, and relationships can make all of us insecure. But the idea that a woman shouldn’t move in with a man because it might make him less likely to marry her feels very foreign to Swedish culture.

    Living together before marriage is simply the norm. The idea of proposing to someone you haven’t lived with first would feel almost backwards.

    Marrying someone means formalizing two lives you already know fit together, not making a leap of faith and hoping the daily reality works out.

    Sambo, the word for living together, isn’t a stepping stone toward the “real” thing. For a lot of couples, it basically is the real thing, just without the paperwork. People buy houses, have children, build entire lives together and may never get married at all. Nobody is necessarily waiting for the next step.

    And even engagement looks a little different.

    In Sweden, when you get engaged, both people wear a ring.

    Traditionally, the rings are engraved with your partner’s name and the date you got engaged, signaling the commitment you’ve both made to the relationship.

    When you get married, the woman gets a second ring. The man often keeps the same ring it’s taken off for the wedding ceremony and put back on, with the wedding date added to the engraving.

    Sweden has definitely become more Americanized when it comes to engagements. There are more diamond rings and elaborate proposals now than I remember growing up.

    But the man still gets a ring.

    And usually, even if the proposal itself is a surprise, the idea of getting married isn’t.

    They’ve talked about it along the way. Both people already know this is where the relationship is heading.

    The proposal might be a surprise.

    The answer probably isn’t.

    And maybe that’s why another American question has always sounded a little strange to me:

    “Why hasn’t he married her?”

    Not why haven’t they gotten married?

    Why hasn’t he married her?

    It’s such a tiny difference in language, but there’s an entire relationship script hiding inside it.

    He’s the one deciding.

    She’s the one waiting.

    He’s choosing.

    She’s hoping to be chosen.

    And suddenly we’re back at the cow.

    Of course Swedish women want love and commitment. Of course people wonder where relationships are going. And yes, we can make ourselves completely insane over another human being too.

    We’re Swedish. We’re not some emotionally evolved Nordic species. 😂

    But underneath all of it is an assumption I grew up with that I never really thought about until I lived somewhere else:

    Both people are choosing.

    Maybe that’s the part that gets lost in the cow-and-milk logic.

    A woman isn’t giving a man the benefits of a relationship and hoping he’ll eventually reward her with marriage.

    They’re both trying the relationship on for size.

    They’re both deciding.

    They’re both committing.

    And if they get engaged, they’re both wearing the ring.

    Forget about buying the cow and getting the milk for free.

    I’m still stuck on a more important question:

    Does the bull even fit in the barn? 😂

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  • An Update From the Spider HOA

    Yesterday I cleared a few spiderwebs off the patio up in the north GA mountains.

    For the record, I have nothing against spiders. They’re good to have around, they eat bugs, they build genuinely impressive webs, they mind their business. I only asked one thing:

    Please don’t build across the spots where I walk.

    Cool, well, that request got denied.

    This morning several webs were already back up. Overnight. No permits, no contractors, nothing. Just fully rebuilt structures like it was nothing. Mildly impressive honestly. One even had a tiny spider chilling in it, so I guess they’re doing affordable housing now too.

    Tried to get a picture but the green background, my phone refusing to focus on an actual spider, and my frenchie barking at me the entire time made it basically impossible to document.

    So here’s where the Spider HOA and I landed:

    You can stay. Eat the bugs. Build your webs, I respect the craftsmanship.

    But if it crosses into my walking path, I’m knocking it down, no notice.

    We’ll see what they’ve got tonight 😂

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  • Things You’re Not Supposed to Complain About

    Apparently, there are certain things you’re not supposed to complain about.

    Traffic is one of them.

    Sleep is another.

    Unfortunately, I currently have complaints about both.

    This week, it took me almost two hours to get to work. The first hour was just my normal commute, which already feels like I’ve completed a small task before I’ve actually arrived at the place where I’m supposed to do tasks.

    Then I got to my exit.

    There had been an accident, and traffic was backed up for what looked like at least a mile. I sat there for almost another hour.

    At first, I was remarkably reasonable about it. There’s been an accident. Someone is probably having a much worse morning than I am. Getting irritated isn’t going to make the cars move any faster. I’ll listen to something. It’s fine.

    I was fine.

    And then I noticed the left-turn lane.

    Cars were sailing past all of us who had been sitting there, patiently waiting in the lanes that actually went where we were trying to go. One after another. They’d drive all the way to the front and then force themselves back in.

    At first I just noticed them.

    Then I started judging them.

    Then I started keeping track of them.

    Then I could feel the heat rising.

    I wanted to honk. Not because honking would accomplish anything. Obviously it wouldn’t. I just wanted them to know.

    I SEE YOU.

    This was when I noticed something slightly alarming .

    I might be turning into my mother.

    My mother’s road rage is legendary in our family. This is not classified information. She knows it. Her children know it. I’m reasonably certain a few motorists in Sweden know it.

    She’s also usually not wrong. Someone is following too closely? That’s dangerous, you need room to brake. Someone is doing something stupid in traffic? They probably shouldn’t be doing it.

    It’s the delivery where Mom and I differ.

    I might think, that person is following way too close.

    Mom has been known to arrive rather quickly at MOTHERFUCKER.

    All of her children tease her about this.

    And yet there I was, sitting in Atlanta traffic, watching what felt like the hundredth car cruise past me in the left-turn lane, feeling my internal temperature steadily rising.

    Oh no. Is this how it starts?

    Fortunately, I remembered First Date Follow Up. It’s a radio segment where someone goes on a first date, is certain it went wonderfully, and then can’t understand why the other person has vanished off the face of the earth. They call the missing date to find out what went wrong.

    It is ridiculous.

    It is also extremely entertaining.

    And, ironically, my mother is the one who told me about it.

    So apparently my mother provided both the genetic predisposition toward road rage and the treatment for it.

    I turned it on.

    Within a few minutes, instead of monitoring the left-turn lane like an unpaid traffic enforcement officer, I was deeply invested in why some stranger wasn’t getting a second date.

    The cars were still cutting in. Traffic was still barely moving. Nothing about my actual situation had changed.

    But I had stopped caring quite so much.

    By the time I got to the office, I was exhausted. Which seems ridiculous, considering I’d spent the previous two hours sitting down. But apparently trying not to lose your shit in traffic takes energy.

    So yes, I’m complaining about traffic.

    And while I’m breaking the rules, I’ve also been woken up around 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning three nights in a row.

    Traffic and sleep.

    Two things nobody wants to hear you complain about.

    I’ll try to come up with something more interesting next time.

    In the meantime, if you see me sitting in traffic, talking angrily to people who cannot hear me that’s just the family gene showing up.

    I’m still in the early stages.

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  • My friend Sussi is a DJ.

    Not in the she likes music and occasionally DJs at a friend’s party kind of way.

    She’s Acid Sussi.

    She’s been playing clubs and events around Stockholm for years. She’s played Boiler Room. She and her longtime partner have a DJ duo called Solid Sliders, and they just put out a track called “Get Ill.” And more than a decade after she started doing it, she’s still out playing on weekends.

    I find this ridiculously cool.

    But here’s the thing.

    I knew her when she just had the records.

    So. Many. Records.

    We met in school, although I don’t remember exactly when we went from knowing each other to really becoming friends. What I do remember is that music was always a huge part of who she was. She loved vinyl and, for as long as I can remember, wanted to DJ.

    And then she actually did it.

    There’s something really wonderful about watching someone you love actually do the thing they talked about doing when they were young.

    Sussi and I have a lot of history long walks that turned into long talks, all-nighters spent talking and dancing in equal measure, raves we found our way to together. There are entire pieces of my younger life that have Sussi in them.

    And after all these years, she’s still one of the people I can talk to about absolutely anything.

    And when I say talk, I mean talk.

    We can take one subject and disappear into it for hours. We don’t just exchange opinions and move on we dig, we question, we turn a thing over until we’ve looked at it from every angle. One thought leads to another and suddenly we’ve spent hours on something most people would have wrapped up in twenty minutes.

    She also knows me well enough not to simply tell me what I want to hear. If I come to her with something difficult, I’ll get the love. I’ll get the understanding. And then, somewhere in there, she’ll ask a question that makes me stop and reconsider the whole thing.

    And now the friend who has always been willing to dig a little deeper has officially become a therapist.

    This year, Sussi graduated from Karolinska Institutet and is beginning an entirely new chapter in her life.

    She’s had quite a few chapters already. She’s been a hairstylist. She studied psychology. She became a UX designer. She became Acid Sussi.

    And now she’s a therapist.

    Who’s still a DJ.

    Of course she is.

    What I love about her story is that she never seems to have discarded an old version of herself to make room for the next one. The psychology student didn’t replace the girl with the records. The UX designer didn’t replace the DJ. And becoming a therapist isn’t going to make Acid Sussi disappear.

    She just kept adding chapters.

    And the more I think about it, the more I suspect neither the DJ nor the therapist is really a new version of her. They were both there all along the girl surrounded by records who wanted to make people dance, and the friend who could spend hours talking about life, people, and why we do the things we do.

    I remember the records.

    I remember the long conversations.

    I remember the dancing.

    And now I get to watch one of my closest friends begin yet another chapter of her life.

    I’m incredibly proud of the therapist she’s becoming.

    I love the friend she’s always been. ❤️

    And I still think it’s pretty damn cool that she became the DJ.

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  • Vendor Speed Dating

    A couple of weeks ago, a woman reached out to me on LinkedIn about an invite-only event: leaders from the data and AI world, sitting down for roundtable discussions on data strategy, AI, and where the two are headed.

    “Blending peer perspectives with real-world approaches,” the invite promised.

    Sounded interesting. Totally up my alley.

    I noticed they specifically weren’t inviting salespeople.

    Now I know why. 😂

    Walking into a room full of strangers and making small talk is not exactly my idea of a good time, so I was hesitant. But the subjects sounded too good to pass up, so I went.

    I got seated with two other people, one from Microsoft and one from HP, both at companies about the same size as where I work. We hit it off immediately, mostly by admitting we’d each almost bailed, and then by discovering we all wore Oura rings.

    None of us knew what was coming.

    There was a stack of papers on the table. It looked like we were supposed to rate something. I didn’t think much of it.

    Then it became clear.

    Speed dating. Basically.

    Except instead of asking what you like to do on weekends, they ask about your data architecture. And instead of deciding on a second date, you’re deciding whether your company needs their software.

    Eight vendors. Every 10 to 15 minutes, they rotated from table to table. Pitch their product, ask about our problems, explain how they could fix them.

    Yes, I realize this is also known as a sales pitch.

    Luckily, the woman from HP had an actual use case, so I mostly sat back and watched vendor after vendor take a swing at solving it.

    Ding. Next vendor. Ding. Next vendor. Ding. Next vendor.

    This went on for a couple of hours, after a full workday.

    Here’s the thing, though. I’d spent all this time before the event wondering if I’d be out of my depth. Would everyone else know more than me? Be more fluent in AI strategy and governance and all the impressive-sounding stuff?

    Instead, I noticed something I didn’t expect: we are all trying to figure something out.

    People from massive companies were stuck on the same kinds of problems, fishing for the same kinds of answers, sometimes just sitting there letting someone else do the talking, same as me.

    That was worth more than anything any vendor pitched.

    A bell rang for dinner. I’d made enough professional connections for one evening.

    I left.

    No dinner, no new software.

    Just slightly less impostor syndrome, a funny story to tell at work, and a few new LinkedIn connections.

    I’ll take it.

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  • The Art of Connection

    In the past couple of days, the idea of connection has been on my mind.

    A close friend told me that after taking a DNA test, he discovered that his ancestry traced back to Nigeria, specifically to the Igbo people. Since then, he has embraced that part of his heritage and sometimes uses it as a way to connect with new colleagues at work. For him, it’s a way to let someone know they’re not alone, that there’s another person who might understand what it’s like to sometimes be the only one in the room who looks different, and that they, too, have every opportunity to grow and become everything they dream of.

    My first reaction was:

    Yes, but you’ve never been to Nigeria. Your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all born in the United States. You can say your heritage is Nigerian, but are you Nigerian?

    I think that way because I’ve experienced the opposite.

    When I go to Swedish events, I often meet people who introduce themselves as Swedish because a great-grandparent emigrated to America. They’ve never been to Sweden. They don’t speak Swedish. In my mind, I’ve always thought of them as Americans with Swedish heritage rather than Swedes.

    But the more I thought about it, the more I realized maybe I was looking at it from the wrong angle.

    After all, it’s kind of sweet.

    We’re all looking for something that makes the world feel a little smaller. We look for common ground, an opening to start a conversation, the possibility of a new friendship, and the reassurance that we’re not alone.

    Yesterday I wandered through H&M, and for a moment it felt like the comfort of home. I go to Swedish events because I enjoy speaking my language and sharing traditions. And when I meet another European, especially another Scandinavian, there’s an immediate familiarity. We may come from different countries, but there’s an unspoken understanding that we grew up on the same side of the world.

    Might that be what connection is all about?

    It doesn’t have to be nationality.

    Sometimes it’s as simple as being the only two women in a room or us both having dogs. I do this all the time. If I meet another dog owner, especially someone with the same breed as mine, we instantly have something to talk about. We compare food brands, swap funny stories, show each other pictures, and somehow complete strangers become people we’ve connected with, even if it’s only for a brief moment.

    I’ve even noticed that dogs seem to do something similar. They get excited to meet other dogs in general, but they also seem to recognize their own breed.

    I think we’re all just looking for that sense of belonging.

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  • Life as an Analyst

    The truth is, we spend most of our days trying not to follow every interesting rabbit hole the data puts in front of us.

    Someone asks for “just a quick number,” and three joins, two CTEs, and one existential crisis later, we’ve found it—along with four other numbers nobody asked for but that we now can’t stop thinking about. We tell ourselves we’ll ignore them. We do not ignore them.

    Case in point: I sat down last Saturday morning to look at one weird number. Four hours later it was afternoon, I still hadn’t finished, and nobody on earth had asked me to work on a Saturday. That’s not dedication. It’s curiosity… with questionable boundaries.

    I’ve always loved puzzles. Crossword puzzles, logic puzzles… it doesn’t really matter. I don’t even mind asking for a clue now and then. The fun isn’t knowing the answer. The fun is figuring it out.

    That’s probably why I became an analyst.

    The truth is, half our job is explaining that correlation isn’t causation, while the other half is secretly hoping it is—just this once. It would make the story so much cleaner.

    People think analysts spend their days building reports and dashboards. We do. But what we really do is ask questions.

    Why is that number different? Why did it change? Should those two reports match? What happened here?

    Every dataset tells a story. Our job is figuring out what it’s trying to say.

    We build dashboards that we genuinely hope will help people make better decisions. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they’re opened once, admired for thirty seconds, and never seen again.

    The truth is, nobody actually wants the raw data. They want the one number that confirms what they already believed walking into the meeting.

    We know this. We give them the number. Then, gently, we show them the other numbers.

    This is called being thorough. It’s also called hope.

    Every “quick question” is a Trojan horse for a two-day project, and we say yes anyway—not because we have to, but because we’re curious like that. Somewhere between the fifth JOIN and the sixth GROUP BY, this stopped being a job requirement and became a personality trait.

    We don’t fix the data because someone asked us to. We fix it because leaving it wrong feels like leaving a picture frame crooked on someone else’s wall. It nags at us until we fix it. Or maybe that’s just me.

    I didn’t finish that Saturday problem in one sitting, by the way. I came back to it Sunday. I’m still a little annoyed about it.

    Maybe that’s the real job description nobody puts in the posting.

    Not “Proficient in SQL, Power BI, Tableau, SSIS…”

    Although yes, preferably someone who can also remain reasonably calm at 11 p.m. when a package fails for reasons the error log refuses to explain.

    No.

    The real qualification is curiosity.

    Someone who can’t walk past a number that doesn’t quite fit without wondering why.

    The most honest conversation in any company happens in a footnote that says, “Excludes outliers.”

    Almost nobody reads it.

    We read it. We wrote it. We know exactly which outliers were excluded, why they were excluded, and we probably have strong opinions about whether they should have been excluded at all.

    That’s the quiet, slightly obsessive, deeply curious life of an analyst.

    Chasing the number nobody asked for. Straightening the picture frame nobody noticed was crooked. Following one more rabbit hole than we probably should.

    Because every unexpected number tells a story. And every story begins with someone curious enough to ask one more question.

    Our minds aren’t wired to stop at the answer. They’re wired to wonder what else we might be missing.

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  • Peanut Butter Toast

    Some favorites never change.

    When I woke up this morning, I knew I wanted to write something.

    Here’s the thing: I have a long list of subjects and ideas for future posts, but they all seem perfectly happy staying on that list. They rarely volunteer to become an actual blog post.

    So, I wandered into the kitchen to make myself something to go with my coffee.

    Peanut butter toast.

    I’m trying to remember when I got hooked on it. It definitely wasn’t growing up because peanut butter wasn’t really a thing in Sweden when I was a child. Somewhere along the way it found me, and apparently decided it wasn’t leaving.

    If you ask me what my favorite food is, there’s a good chance I’ll say peanut butter toast with sliced bananas.

    Which is funny, because I’m actually a foodie.

    Food has always been a big part of life in my family. We made a celebration out of good meals, and whoever had cooked was praised as if they’d just won a Michelin star. I still love trying new restaurants, new cuisines, and dishes I’ve never had before, and one of my favorite parts of traveling is discovering local food.

    There’s something special about that first bite of a meal you know you’re going to love. I swear it sends little feel good signals all over your body.

    A while back I won a prize at work, and they interviewed me for the company newsletter. One of the questions was, “What’s your favorite food?”

    Without thinking, I answered, “Peanut butter toast.”

    I’m pretty sure they expected something a little more exciting.

    The picture I sent to work when they asked for my favorite food: peanut butter toast and bananas, on my favorite koala plate.

    It’s hard to pick just one favorite — avocado’s a close second (if I see it on a menu, I’m probably ordering it before I finish reading the description), and peanut butter with chocolate is its own category of unbeatable. But none of that changes the answer I keep coming back to.

    As I stood there this morning with my coffee and peanut butter toast, I started thinking about comfort food.

    It’s funny how some foods stay with us through the years. Not because they’re fancy or impressive, but because they never disappoint. They taste exactly the way you expect them to. They make an ordinary morning feel just a little bit better.

    For me, that’s peanut butter toast with sliced bananas.

    Simple.

    Reliable.

    And somehow… still perfect.

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  • The Milk, the Bees, and Time

    My mom had me when she was very young, so I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandparents. They lived in the countryside about 90 minutes from Stockholm, where they grew their own vegetables, and my grandfather was a beekeeper. He loved his bees and believed just about everything could be cured with a bee sting and honey.

    Looking back, everything seemed so green and beautiful.

    Just down the road was a farmer where I would go to help out, mostly because I wanted to be around the animals. That’s also where we bought our milk. If it was cold outside, Grandma would leave the milk on the porch. Otherwise, it went into the refrigerator, where the cream would slowly rise to the top.

    Every morning she would take a spoon, carefully skim off the thick layer of cream, and pour it into a glass. Then she’d look at me with a smile and say, “Now this is real skim milk.”

    The joke, of course, was that I insisted I wanted the skim milk from the grocery store.

    There were only two buses a day from their little village into the nearby town of Avesta. Sometimes we’d take the bus to swim at the indoor public pool or simply wander through the shops. When you’re a child, everything feels enormous. The town felt like a city, and even an ordinary bus ride felt like an adventure.

    My grandfather came to Sweden from Poland after the Second World War. He met my grandmother, fell in love, and stayed. Even on the day he died, he still spoke Swedish with his own unmistakable accent. He was a wonderful grandfather to me, although I later learned there were other sides to him. My mother, aunts, and uncle have shared stories of how hard he could be on the family. It’s funny how we can know the same person so differently.

    Memory has a way of opening one door after another. One thought leads to the next until you’re wandering through places you haven’t visited in years.

    One thing I remember my grandmother saying was, “The older you get, the faster the years go.”

    At the time, I thought, Right…

    Years felt endless. School semesters seemed to last forever, and summer vacations felt like entire lifetimes.

    The funny thing is, I don’t ever remember my grandmother being young. Looking back, I realize she was only 42 when I was born. Forty-two. Younger than many grandparents are today. But in my mind, she has always been wearing her house dress, with her short curly hair, standing in the kitchen, always baking or cooking something.

    She was one of those people who always seemed to be in good spirits. Looking back, I know she had lived through difficult times, yet she never lost her sense of humor. Even in the final years of her life, she was quick with a joke and somehow managed to make the people around her laugh.

    Now, years later, I finally understand what she meant.

    The future has a way of arriving quietly. Things you once thought were impossibly far away are suddenly here, and something that happened a year ago can feel like yesterday.

    Maybe time doesn’t actually speed up.

    Maybe we just get better at noticing how precious it is.

    That’s also why I choose to write the way I do.

    Life has never been free of heartache or worry. Like everyone else, I’ve had moments that changed me, and there are stories I may tell one day. But there is already plenty in this world competing for our attention: headlines, arguments, and reasons to feel overwhelmed.

    This little corner of the internet isn’t meant to ignore those things. It’s meant to make room for something else.

    I want to remember the taste of fresh milk from my grandparents’ farm, my grandmother’s laugh, the adventures that felt enormous when I was little, the dogs sleeping at my feet, and all the ordinary moments that quietly become the memories we treasure.

    Because when I look back on my own life, it’s the ordinary moments that have stayed with me the longest.

    And I’ve noticed something else. Many of the stories that are hilarious today were anything but funny when they happened. At the time I worried, cried, overthought, or wondered how I’d ever get through them. Twenty years later, they’re the stories that make everyone around the dinner table laugh.

    I wouldn’t choose to relive them, but I have learned that time has a remarkable sense of humor.

    That’s why I write about the lighter side of life. Not because difficult things don’t happen, but because eventually, if we’re lucky, some of them become stories instead of burdens.

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  • The Rabbit Hole of Overthinking

    “I was thinking maybe, someday, I’d like an electric car. Five minutes later I was calculating battery production, worrying about climate change, imagining my dogs overheating, and wondering what kind of planet my nieces and nephews will inherit. Meanwhile, my perfectly good car was sitting in the garage wondering what it had done wrong.”

    Anyone else’s brain take the scenic route?

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