Category: Mental Meanderings

Years ago, I joined an international pen pal site to practice my German with a native speaker. For a year or so, I wrote to a guy living in Stuttgart until he got a little creepy and started sending underexposed photos overexposing himself. Then my profile lay fallow at the pen pal website until a…

My 88-year-old dad knocked on my bedroom door at 12:30 am. I was sleeping so deeply that he just let himself in. (Note to self: buy a lockable doorknob asap). For the last 16 years, he’s lived on the lower level of the house, I’ve been upstairs. Turning my lamp on, I squinted at him…

The Lost Lands Music Festival in rural Ohio east of Columbus is one of the most famous bass electronic dance music festivals in the world. Unlike a dance club that plays higher frequency EDM, Lost Lands features longer wavelength sound that can travel for miles. When such long wavelengths hit obstacles like hills, they can…

Maybe you’ve noticed it, too. Seniors who live to be very old seem to be the type of people who think the glass is half full, not half empty. In my job, I can’t remember spending time with a patient who is 95 but humorless, rude, and full of regrets. More often, the very elderly…

When Gen Xers were kids, we thought of grandparents as gray-haired, bespectacled people who liked to sit on rocking chairs on the porch and listen to the radio. They spent some time with us but not in an active way. We sat around while they told stories about when they were young, we helped them…