The "Adulting" Handbook

A few years ago, my therapist said something that’s stuck with me ever since: “Life is a little harder for you.” What she meant was that because of my generalized anxiety disorder, I need to constantly rein in my racing thoughts — the same ones that…

When I was growing up, my dad would retell an anecdote about a time he and my youngest sister saw a little boy calling to his mother in Barnes and Noble. “Mom! Mom!” he yelled. His mother, who was standing several feet away, turned to face him.…

When I was a kid, one of the most amazing commercials ever created would run in between reruns of Seinfeld and Friends. The short, sexy saxophone-infused ad for Viennetta, a British frozen dessert cake, is at the same time deeply hilarious, and…

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle seem like they’re doing really well in sunny southern California. They’ve kept a rather low profile since stepping away from their royal duties in January 2020, other than announcing they’re developing content for…

Although sleep is a constant struggle for me, and even more so during the pandemic, I’m proud to say that I’ve dozed to Deepak Chopra’s guided meditations a handful of times. His sonorous baritone likely played some role, but I’ve wondered whether…

Even in the bizarre world of ASMR, Sarah Toth’s videos stand out. Her YouTube channel is wildly successful; she has over a million subscribers, 300 million video views, and enough sponsorships and ad revenue to support her family of four. This isn’t…

When I was growing up, my dad would retell an anecdote about a time he and my youngest sister saw a little boy calling to his mother in Barnes and Noble. “Mom! Mom!” he yelled. His mother, who was standing several feet away, turned to face him.…

My sister and I have a coded phrasing that we use when we discuss queerness around our parents. “When he called me ‘sweetie,’ I knew his shoes must be shiny,” my sister Loree will say, to avoid the inevitable winces from our religious kin. We both…

In an early, defining scene of To All the Boys: Always and Forever, the newest and purportedly final installment of the popular rom-com trilogy, Lara Jean (played adoringly by Lana Condor) gets some unhappy news: After months of waiting in…

Everybody figured Kim Kardashian and Kanye West were headed towards splitsville a month ago, when news broke that Kardashian had retained the services of celebrity divorce attorney Laura Wasser. Now their breakup is official: the 40-year-old reality…

We’re getting a clearer picture of the cruel tactics Shia LaBeouf allegedly used to abuse FKA twigs during their relationship of nearly a year. The reported details of LaBeouf's violence and manipulation are harrowing, and it can’t be easy for the…

We’re a year into the pandemic and I have officially fallen from my pedestal of hermit-in-quarantine bliss. This tumble was both figurative and literal: Last weekend, midnight snack in hand — a sandwich, two cans of Dr. Pepper, and a bowl of ice…

Like so many people, I lost a large portion of my income during the pandemic. A lot of bills went unpaid and, often, unopened. For months, I have been inundated with robocalls and neon envelopes from creditors. Last month, I was woken up by the…

It was never a question of if, but Hollywood has still moved at startling velocity to get the Reddit Wall Street debacle adapted for the big screen. Just one week after millions of investors teamed up through r/WallStreetBets to drive up the price…

Here’s a word salad that’d never make sense outside of 2021: AOC did a Twitch stream about GameStop stonks on Thursday night. The beginning of the livestream was plagued with technical issues ("This is an ASMR channel now," the Congresswoman joked,…

Until it drew the interest of Redditors on a discussion board called r/WallStreetBets, GameStop was dying a slow death along with brick-and-mortar shopping malls, where the world's largest video game and electronics retailer was once ubiquitous. The…

Breakups are the worst. As if the emotional turmoil isn’t bad enough, there’s the logistical headache of figuring out how to handle the money part of the breakup. Six years into my last relationship, my live-in boyfriend at the time had quit his job…

The gig economy is poppin’. There are close to 57 million freelancers working in the US, and research suggests that number is expected to rise by 14% by 2027. There’s a lot of moaning and groaning about the instability of the hustle economy, but the…