Category: careerpaths

I returned to New York yesterday after a few days in Paris. This country always looks different from abroad, and people I meet still speak of NYC with a certain awe, expressing their dream to go to visit our chaotic metropolis. But more and more, I hear disgust with the US. We are violent, drug…

For years I envied my friends whose lives mapped to the “normal” template, who hit all the appropriate milestones in the appropriate order: learning to walk, starting school, finding a passion – or at least a predilection – starting a career, raising a family, buying a small house, maybe a bigger house, getting older, a…

I’ve often thought about instituting a sycophant tax on consulting services designed to tell leaders what they want to hear. It’s amazing how many organizations ask for advice but don’t really want to hear it. Not that amazing in a daily life: there are many times when it might be prudent to keep your thoughts…

I used to be a writer. Fiction, theater, bad angsty poetry. For years I wrote every day, and when I look back at my free-written musings, I am surprised to find little nuggets of who I used to be. Vivid and digressive. Sometimes so obsessive it makes me cringe. But real. Then I got a…

I just read a post on LinkedIn that made me want to bitch slap the author. The post, titled “I am not responsible for your student debt” goes on to talk about how she went to the Air Force and then went to college (paid for, as many commenters noted, by U.S. taxpayers). I paid…

A sudden medical scare sent me spinning off into the past, unspooling the visions and variations of my aspirations over decades. Music came first, when my grandparents sent us an upright piano. I must have been three years old. I remember following the piano into the den and coming out when I could play “He’s…