You leave the dinner party. You weren't even talking that much. Maybe you said five sentences across two hours. And yet you fall into the passenger seat feeling like you've just finished a marathon. The easy explanation is the one you've heard your whole life. You're an introvert. People ...Read More
I'm going to start this one with a confession. I've spent most of my adult life trying to figure out which kind of father I had. I don't mean this as a complaint. My father is, by most measures, a good man. He stayed. He worked. He provided. He ...Read More
I want to describe a specific period of my life, somewhere between thirty-three and thirty-five, that I didn't recognize as a problem at the time, because it wasn't, by any conventional measure, a problem. I was, on paper, fine. The restaurants were running. I had a flat I liked. ...Read More
My father bought a house in 2003. He retired in 2018. Between those two dates, I would estimate, conservatively, that he made nine hundred trips to the hardware store down the road from his house. That is not an exaggeration. I'm not even sure it's an overstatement. He went, ...Read More
I have a friend—I'll call him Tom, because he isn't called that—who, every time we have dinner, talks for about ninety percent of the meal. I don't think Tom would describe himself this way. If you asked Tom what kind of conversationalist he was, I'm fairly sure he'd say ...Read More
I had a thought, last month, while I was washing a single coffee cup at my kitchen sink in Bangkok. It wasn't profound. It wasn't preceded by a therapy breakthrough or a long meditation. It just arrived, the way the real thoughts do, between the rinse and the drying ...Read More