We met in high school, and if we wind up getting married some day (I think we’ve got a damn good shot, too) that will be impossibly cute and alarmingly pat ( Read more... )

I frequently find myself feeling like an impostor.

Let me explain. Or better yet, let the New York Times explain:

Social psychologists have studied what they call the impostor phenomenon since at least the 1970s, when a pair of therapists at Georgia State University used the phrase to describe the internal experience of a group of high-achieving ( Read more... )

I was 17 and angry.

Stories about fighting the law that start with angry 17-year-olds can pretty much go one of two ways. Put very, very simply, in distilled black and white, the kid can do something bad or something good.

I did something good.

I went to what was then a "highly selective" public high school in Staten Island. For those familiar with ( Read more... )

Whose LJ is it anyway? Balancing personal expression and friends-list sensibilities in determining content.It’s my LJ. That’s why I like it so much ( Read more... )

It was cold outside, and there was snow on the ground. I was in the first grade, waiting for the school bus outside with some friends and a neighbor, who was keeping an eye on me while my mother took my little sister home to get warm ( Read more... )

There were 30 seconds left in 2007 and I was alone in a crowd, a mostly quiet observer. A couple from Miami I had just interviewed was behind me, shouting in unison with hundreds of other people on Boston Common. My feet felt so frozen I was beginning to get a little bit worried about potential permanent toe damage ( Read more... )

I don’t think Jesse and I had much choice in the matter of our being best friends. Our mothers were best friends since they were five years old, and Jesse was just a year older than I was, so we spent a lot of our childhood playing together. We got much closer around 10 or 11, but we were always best friends. That’s just how it was ( Read more... )

( let's talk about sex, baby. )

Staten Island, New York, where I grew up, is a nice little spot that is not quite city, not quite suburb. Some parts of it are among the roughest in New York; Park Hill or the Stapleton projects are places I don’t want to be in the daylight, let alone at night. Some parts of the island seem impossibly picturesque for what is actually part of New ( Read more... )

If you have not already, and you would not mind doing so, and you're not trapped in some awful place without internet (e.g.: an abandoned silo, a subway, the Fung Wah bus, the lecture hall where I have oceanography), and you have a computer, and you're reading this, throw me a vote over here at therealljidolI could use it this week. Personally, I don't think it ( Read more... )