For starters, we get the world.
I am a pagan. An unbeliever. A heathen. An infidel. While my beliefs about the existence of God and souls have changed considerably over the course of my life, to the majority of the world, I’ve never been someone worthy of blessings, never been someone who would make it to heaven.
I was born and culturally am still a Hindu. Despite how terrible many elements of religion were for me — I am a woman and I am queer — I still respect the role that belief in a higher power plays in many people’s lives. My closest friends are…
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I’m fully vaccinated now, but I have a few keepsakes.
Today has been over fourteen days since I sat on a cold chair in a Giant’s pharmacy and watched as a slightly irritated, lab-coated woman punched a needle in my arm for the second time. I got a card that said Pfizer on it. I registered with the government. I was told to wait two weeks for my freedom. And today is nothing short of a miracle.
Last April, producing a vaccine within a year seemed like a pipe dream. It had never been done before. There were a million problems with trials. There were no good cures. Distribution seemed…
A poem about my best friend.
She became my best friend when I was six and she was four. Before that, I think the age gap was too large. My parents frequently remind me, when we’re all around the dinner table and joking about life, that when they brought her home from the hospital, I asked them to return her.
When we were pre-teens, we were homeschooled by our mother. We spent every waking moment together, from hobbies and extracurriculars to library runs. We played in the garden for hours and ruined my mom’s china and clothes.
Then I became a teen and worked at CERN…
I love white jokes, but they do make me uncomfortable.
Writing this article makes me uncomfortable. Partly because it’s very much not the most important racism issue we face right now — am I wasting time talking about it? — and partly because I’m calling myself out.
More than usual, I also feel a need to caveat this piece. I am open to changing my mind. I am not trying to compare white racism with racism against minorities (there’s a power difference there). I am not excusing discrimination. I imagine even a few months from now I might have a different take.
But I can be/have caught myself being/sometimes might…
They are better at increasing happiness and job prospects.
This is a hobby for me. I don’t write for the money, not really, even though I have an agent and three books in the works and earn a decent amount on Medium.
Music is a hobby too, though I’ve played the piano for twenty years, once had two music agents and a song on the radio, and was supposed to end up in Los Angeles.
And then there’s physics. I worked at Fermilab and with a Nobel Laureate in supernova cosmology. I researched at CERN the year the Higgs Boson was discovered. But it was never a career. …
Every new beginning starts with a stranger.
This is entirely fictional and a short story I wrote a long time ago, when I was a teenager. I have never published fiction on Medium before, but have read some top-quality content and figured I’d give it a go. For those of you looking for my usual content, this isn’t it. TW: Terminal cancer.
Jamie sat down on the far end of the seat, biting her nails with a fury that she could only muster up when she was at peace with the world. She had tied her dirty blonde hair up in a tight ponytail, but it yanked…
DWEEBS STORIES
And how to hire a diverse team.
I don’t write as often as I’d like to about Dweebs Global, but it is by far the most interesting and rewarding thing in my life. It is also one of the most diverse workplaces I’ve ever seen, let alone worked at.
We haven’t tried to achieve this incredible diversity by force — or even by targeted recruiting. The websites we use to find volunteers are unfortunately biased toward privileged Americans. And as a volunteer-run organization, we face the challenge that volunteers inherently come from places where people have the time and ability to work for free.
Yet, here we…
It’s a five step process that rarely fails.
Since I was about fifteen years old, I have always been the love guru in my friend circle. The matchmaker. The wingwoman. The dating profile hacker.
Though I didn’t date a ton myself, I spent three years researching everything that was out there in social science about friendships, romance, and relationships. Then I applied it to my twenty-somethings friends who were down on their luck and desperate for love.
And I started to notice a pattern. There were certain steps along the process to falling in love that almost everyone used, subconsciously or otherwise. Something would feel right — and…
I run a global organization with hundreds of volunteers and over 25 teams. This is how I literally save what’s left of my sanity and my life.
I famously have no work-life balance. I run an international org that has hundreds of volunteers around the globe and over twenty-five teams from video editing to engineering to mental health. We have community outreach efforts launched in Nigeria, India, Philippines, the U.S., and Pakistan.
To just keep it all running, I work over twelve hours a day, seven days a week. My Saturdays and Sundays are so full of meetings I can’t even grab lunch with my parents. Late night and early morning calls are a requirement when it’s the only way to get people in San Francisco, Lagos…
I gave it to him within the first month we were dating.
When I was young, I loved deeply. I’d meet strangers and upgrade them to the best friend tier within weeks. I wanted to share my entire life with my family, my extended family, and my classmates.
I fell in love with buildings, places, and songs. I cried when we flew out of Egypt, head against the cold airplane window, because I didn’t know when I’d be back to one of the most gorgeous countries in the world.
I loved and I loved deeply, passionately, unreservedly. I wrote poetry because my heart was open, the words were honest, and there were…
