A few months ago, I received a phone call from my cousin asking if I would perform her upcoming wedding ceremony. The request was so completely unexpected that a storm of thoughts immediately came tumbling wildly into my head:

Thought #1: It was so flattering to be entrusted with one of the most important moments in someone’s life! If I were actually the kind of person who’d ever scrawl out a bucket list, performing a wedding ceremony would probably be on it! Yes, officiating a wedding would be sandwiched between skydiving (I’m lying – I would never) and taking a walking tour of Athens where I’d politely request that the guide not take us near any statues of hybrid creatures with wings because it would probably be in very bad form to die from shock whilst crossing something off a bucket list.

Thought #2: Did I need to get ordained? I could do that online, right?

Thought #3: How f*cking cool is the Internet? Seriously, sometimes I can’t even believe there’s an invention that allows … Continue reading →

For a certain period of time, this was the motto I chose to live my life by: In the grand scheme of things, this moment will not matter in the slightest. Such a mindset was very helpful during years when I was almost chronically making all sorts of silly choices, like skipping Philosophy class because it started way too early (11:15AM) or lying to a boyfriend about where I’d spent the previous evening. But even as those words swirled through my mind back then – even as I conditioned myself to believe that none of my actions could possibly really matter – a part of me was always very much aware that my rehearsed mantra was just a verbal defense mechanism meant to absolve me of the guilt I should have allowed myself to internalize. Had I felt those waves of shame, perhaps I would have made different – wiser – choices.

It was probably during the first semester of my senior year in college when that plastic bubble formed entirely out of Goldschlager and … Continue reading →