This question crops up from time to time, and my response rarely varies. If I could, I would command my 20-year-old self to be confident. The insecurities of youth are soul-destroying, and with the advent of social media and peer pressure for “likes”, young people are constantly under pressure to be better—the assumption being that they are never good enough. They have to keep striving to…
It’s been a terrible week, and there are times when it makes us feel better just to vent, to get our anger and nasty thoughts down on “paper”—like in the olden days when we would spill out our venom in a letter, or more recently, an email, then never mail it. That’s what this post is. We all remember the $10 million “Let them eat…
Ten years ago, I posted twice about the wisdom of encouraging young people to learn to code, Mothers Make Sure Your Daughters Grow Up To Be Coders, and, Both My Left and Right Brains Say Go For It! (I encourage you to read these links.) As an example of my commitment to this skill, I even took an all-day Saturday session called “Ladies Learning to…
For the benefit of new readers, I’m reposting my annual March Madness message. Please tell me I’m not the only person in the world who thought March Madness was about special annual retail sales like Black Friday or Boxing Day. For weeks leading up to the big event and for the duration, I’ve been waiting for the flyers from my favourite retailers to arrive in…
There is a very good explanation for why I like to sleep so much. I was genetically engineered to need above-average amounts of sleep. When I was five years old, my mother had to enroll me in morning kindergarten so I could still nap in the afternoons, and the habit stuck. It was very difficult during my working years to convince my employers that I…
As if I don’t have enough insecurities already about my fashion choices, The New York Times columnist Alisha Haridisani Gupta has given me one more thing to keep me awake worrying at night. In her recent piece, Does Your Winter Scarf Make You Look Old? Gupta suggests that our choice of scarf can make or break the world’s perception of our fashion savoir faire. When…
