Earlier today, in honor of Giving Tuesday, I sent out a tweet promoting the Jane Addams Resources Corporation (JARC), a nonprofit that teaches welding to people in order to help them not only get well-paying jobs but also to develop capacity-building skills. This was the first organization that gave me a chance when I first moved to Chicago in order to scale the nonprofit I established. A brief timeline: Within two weeks of moving to Chicago in 2103, the job…..
One of the best features of Twitter is the opportunity to connect with other people around a specific topic via online chats using a hashtag to “sort” the conversation stream apart from the rest of the flow of general tweets. These interactions expand my horizons, introduce me to other minds and concepts and also give me an opportunity to refine my thoughts about any given topic. Today’s post is about blogging, but more specifically, what inspires us to write. There…..
How many of you are good at giving compliments? How many of you are good at graciously accepting them? If you’re like most people, it’s easier for you to give a compliment than it is to receive one. Know this: when you minimize or refuse to accept a compliment, you are insulting the giver and telling yourself that you are not worthy. Am I being harsh? Nope. As a writer, I love words. I love how words convey meaning, mood…..
Every day, I log at least five miles of walking. In addition to helping with stress relief, I also mentally compose a lot of posts in my head during my daily constitutional. From this, as I sat down to peck out today’s post, two ideas kept filtering to the top of my consciousness: “To thine own self be true.” — Wm. Shakespeare from Hamlet and “I wanna tell you a little secret; being ‘The One’ is just like being in…..
The picture is of me and my younger brother at Thanksgiving in the early 1970s. As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, we moved in with my grandmother after my mom and dad divorced. I had 24 cousins on my mom’s side, and so our Irish Catholic family usually had about 40 people gathered on the major holidays (our year revolved around the pivot points of Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas). We had an Adult Table, populated by my aunts, uncles,…..
Now that the temperature is beginning to drop into the 40s, I make sure to get at least five miles in during walks around my neighborhood while it’s still relatively warm. Winters in Chicago are usually pretty soul crushing and claustrophobic, but the pandemic has ratcheted my despair levels to eleven. During my walks, I encounter families, dogs, hipsters, teenagers and other people like me who enjoy stretching their legs for some exercise. There are those I encounter regularly, as…..
As someone who works in media and publishing, I literally get paid to be online. Immersed in the sea of toots, updates and hashtags, I marinate in bits, bytes and bon mots (and mal mots?) each day. It can be difficult for me to disengage my brain from the firehose of data that streams past me every day. However, I have found that it’s bad for my mental health to spend too much time in the digital realm. Since social…..
When I first moved to Chicago, I tried online dating. It had been an effective method of meeting people in years prior (generating a husband, who is now an ex), so I felt comfortable using the internet once again to search for my next boyfriend-potential-husband. The sheer population difference of a metro area the size of Chicago in comparison to where I had lived in Iowa meant that I had a chance to meet not only a larger number of…..
If you’ve been staying in and self-isolating during the pandemic, first of all: thank you. When we are asked to do something to help, most of us look to the grand or sweeping gestures, the BIG sacrifices to make a difference. During this extremely stressful time, we are asked to be still. Being still is difficult for me. My grandmother used to call me the Dutch Cleanser Girl (it’s an advertising reference to a powdered cleanser that had a similar…..
You’ve probably heard of the phrase, ‘the calm before the storm,’ but there’s a calm after the storm, too. There’s a lull in energy—a drop from the frenzy of the storm—followed by the slow, methodical sifting through the wreckage it caused. Going through the pieces that were broken and altered by the storm takes time. Deciding what to keep and what needs to be thrown away is an exercise in discernment. Once you’ve taken an inventory of what’s worth saving,…..