My ex used to get so irritated at me because I had a habit of stopping for basically anything that looked remotely like it might be struggling in nature.

Turtle in the road? Obviously I’m pulling over. Bird on the ground? Emergency situation. Snake, squirrel, frog, baby bunny, possum, deer that might be “thinking about crossing” (I can’t read minds but I try)? Yep, I’m involved now.

The problem is… sometimes it would turn out to be a rock. Or a random piece of garbage. Or a stick. Not often. But it happened. One time we had a full-blown morality argument over what turned out to be a crumpled fast-food bag that, in my defense, did resemble a distressed raccoon from a distance.

Anyway, I had a little adventure yesterday with an animal in need, and I wanted to tell you about it.

I drove past something on a back road, and it didn’t occur to me until I was well past it that it was a downed bat. As soon as my brain registered it, I immediately turned around. On the way back I was scanning the side of the road for a stick. Not just any stick. THE stick. The one that would let me lift the bat onto a tree branch without letting it get close enough to bite me, so it could recover and fly off into the sunset like a Disney moment.

I’ll admit, I was also contemplating just how painful rabies shots would be.

By the time I got back to where it was, I had a whole rescue operation planned out in my head. I’d spotted the perfect stick, worked out where I’d pull off to the side, how I’d grab the stick while keeping an eye on the road (luckily there’s never much traffic), and how I’d approach the bat without startling it. I pulled up, fully committed and ready to spring into action.

Y’all.

It was a leaf.

Just a giant, misshapen leaf that was apparently too heavy to blow away in the wind.

So yes, I completely understand the annoyance of stopping for wildlife and discovering there was, in fact, never any wildlife involved.

Will I do it again? Absolutely.

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Do I think humans will ever colonize Mars? Probably. Especially since we seem bound and determined to destroy the planet we currently live on. Not to mention, humans have a long history of claiming things that weren’t theirs in the first place. Continents. Islands. Resources. Parking spaces.

Colonizing Mars feels less like a bold new chapter and more like the next logical step.

What I find interesting isn’t whether we’ll get there. It’s what happens after we do. People talk about Mars as if it’s a fresh start for humanity. A chance to leave behind our mistakes and build a better civilization from scratch.

That’s a lovely thought. Unfortunately, humans will be involved.

The first settlers will arrive after years of planning, billions of dollars in investment, and one of the most extraordinary engineering achievements in history.

Within six months, someone will be complaining about the neighbors.

There will be disagreements about where things should be built. Someone will insist the colony council is making terrible decisions. Someone else will start a petition. Someone will create a social media page dedicated entirely to criticizing the air filtration schedule.

At least one person will become irrationally angry about rover parking. Someone will say, “The colony was better before all these new people arrived.”

On Mars. A place that was literally uninhabited five years earlier.

Someone will try to monetize the sunset. Someone else will claim exclusive rights to a particularly nice crater. Someone will decide that what humanity really needs on a brand-new planet is a luxury gated community.

And that’s assuming things go well.

Oh sure, the first human footprint on Mars will make history. The millionth footprint will be someone walking past a pile of litter while complaining that environmental regulations are what’s really holding the colony back.

And maybe that’s the real story. We imagine that putting humans on another planet will change us. Make us better. Enlighten us. But I think we’ll just be the same people in a different place.

We’ll bring our curiosity, our creativity, our determination, and our astonishing ability to solve impossible problems.

We’ll also bring our greed, our tribalism, our bureaucracy, our bad habits and destructive tendencies, and our remarkable ability to turn almost anything into an argument.

The planet might change.

We don’t.

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I’m apparently supposed to know how to build loyal subscribers. Because I have a blog. By the same logic, if you own a bird feeder, you should understand birds. I do not understand birds. I understand that they arrive. They eat. They leave. Sometimes they scream for reasons known only to themselves. The same can be said of people on the internet.

WordPress asked, “How do you build loyal subscribers?” The phrasing makes it sound like you’re designing them in a workshop. You start with some lumber, a few screws, and a basic understanding of email marketing. Several hours later, a fully assembled subscriber emerges from your garage carrying a tote bag and an intense desire to read your thoughts about Costco.

My understanding of loyal subscribers is that they begin as complete strangers and then, through a series of poor life choices, become familiar with your nonsense. At first they read one post. Then another. Then suddenly they’re showing up every week like a neighbor who stopped by once to borrow sugar and somehow now knows where you keep your coffee mugs.

After a while, they’re tuned into your quirks.

“She usually posts when most people are going to bed.”
“She has a cat.”
“She’s overly attached to said cat.”
“Anxiety is probably involved. Yep. See? I told you. Anxiety.”

They know things.

A friend once told me that loyal readers feel like friends. And I think that’s mostly true. We won’t count my ex, who never seemed to have the time to read a single paragraph of my writing when we were married but sure seems remarkably committed to keeping up with my latest developments now.

I won’t lie. Seeing familiar names in the comments and stats feels a little like running into old friends. You might not remember exactly when they first walked through the door, but the place wouldn’t feel the same without them. They’re the familiar faces that make the whole thing feel like home.

Some of them have been around for years. Years. That’s longer than I’ve owned certain kitchen appliances. I don’t know what keeps them coming back. Perhaps they enjoy the writing. Perhaps they identify with the content. Perhaps every Tuesday they accidentally click the wrong bookmark and decide to stay.

The point is that loyalty is difficult to manufacture. You can’t force it. You can’t trap it. You certainly can’t buy a kit online called Build Your Own Dedicated Audience in Three Easy Payments. If you could, half the internet would own one.

I suspect loyal subscribers are built the same way most friendships are built. You keep showing up. They keep showing up. Nobody is entirely sure why.

Over time, a strange, beautiful little community forms around shared jokes, recurring grievances, and the mutual, comforting understanding that absolutely none of us know what we’re doing.

Which is nice. A little alarming. But mostly nice.

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WordPress prompts are getting serious. We’re on proverbs today. Proverbs look great embroidered on pillows or printed on motivational posters, but are they really all that?

Because “follow your dreams” is hard to take seriously when my dreams mostly involve panic, poor decision-making, and being chased by wildlife.

In one dream, I showed up to work wearing nothing but a bath towel and Crocs. Crocs, for God’s sake! In another, I discovered I had somehow been re-enrolled in high school and had forgotten to attend math class for an entire semester. Last week, I dreamed I was being chased through a grocery store by an angry goose wearing a bowtie.

Explain to me which part of that life plan I should be following. People always say your dreams are your subconscious trying to tell you something. If that’s true, my subconscious is an idiot.

Then there’s “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Um. Why not? That seems to be the entire purpose of cake. Nobody buys a cake just to admire it from across the room like it’s a museum exhibit. If we’re not eating the cake, what’s the point? And honestly, if I’ve paid good money for cake, I intend to both have it and eat it. Preferably immediately.

Then we have “The early bird gets the worm.” First of all, I don’t want a worm. Second, have you met early birds? They’re entirely too perky for someone who just won a worm. And they’re awake at an hour that should really require a permit. Look, all I’m saying is if the reward for dragging myself out of bed before sunrise is a worm, I feel like we’ve dramatically oversold this opportunity.

And let’s talk about “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Fine. Now I have six baskets to carry and somehow I’ve made the situation significantly worse. At what point in history was this such a widespread problem that people felt the need to create a proverb about it? Were people just wandering around dropping eggs everywhere? Was there some sort of basket shortage?

“You can be anything you want to be.” I want to be independently wealthy, someone who enjoys exercising, and a person who remembers why they walked into a room. At the moment, I’m zero for three. Wanting to be Wonder Woman turned into a whole awkward HR conversation, so… yeah.

The thing about proverbs is that they can’t even agree with each other.

“Look before you leap.”
“Fortune favors the bold.”

Well, which is it? Am I carefully evaluating risk or hurling myself into the unknown with the confidence of a raccoon launching itself into a dumpster?

Pick a lane, Proverbs.

Because right now, I’m trying to hold six different egg baskets, I’ve got a pocket full of worms I didn’t want, and I’m supposed to be leaping into a dumpster while simultaneously running a risk analysis. It’s exhausting. And honestly, the bowtied goose is gaining on me, and these Crocs just do not have the traction for this.

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Spoiler alert: nobody knows the meaning of life. You can’t say we don’t try, though. Oh, we try. Humanity has spent thousands of years inventing increasingly elaborate explanations for why we’re here. Religion, philosophy, self-help books, wellness influencers who look aggressively hydrated. Everybody’s got an angle.

The ancient Greeks thought the meaning of life was wisdom. The Romans thought it was conquest. Modern capitalism thinks the meaning of life is replying to emails at 9:47 p.m. with “Circling back on this.” I’m sorry, but if the entire purpose of human consciousness is updating spreadsheets and pretending to enjoy networking events, then evolution has made a terrible administrative error.

I think people ask about the meaning of life because they want purpose, and they assume everyone else secretly understands something they don’t. You see it everywhere. People discussing mortgage rates like they actually know how it works while quietly wondering if they remembered to take chicken out of the freezer. Parents giving life advice despite having Googled “do kids still get scurvy” three hours earlier. Entire governments run by people who lock themselves out of their own phones. No one really knows what they’re doing. You can say you do. But you don’t.

And yet somehow society continues. Soup gets made. Coffee happens. Toast exists. Most of us manage to wear matching shoes.

Maybe the meaning of life isn’t some universal truth. Maybe it’s just tiny moments stacked on top of each other until eventually you’ve built something that resembles a life.  

A joke that made someone snort-laugh. The relief of cancelling plans. A dog losing its mind because you came home after taking the trash out for forty seconds. Finding twenty dollars in a coat pocket. Getting into bed with freshly washed sheets and briefly feeling like a person who has their life together.

None of these things sound important on paper. But neither does oxygen. The trouble is, people expect meaning to feel monumental. Trumpets. A glowing mountain. Morgan Freeman narrating your personal growth.

In reality, life mostly feels like standing in a grocery store wondering why there are seventeen types of mustard. And somehow that is the human experience. It’s absurd. Beautiful sometimes. Mostly absurd.

So… the meaning of life. Do we even need one? Would the world change if we suddenly knew the grand scheme of things?

And if you do happen to figure out the entire cosmic purpose of human existence, just keep it to yourself. It’s better that we don’t know. We’d only ruin it.

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It should come as no surprise that I have concerns about certain words. I mean, sure, some words are fine. They’re dependable little workhorses of language. “Chair.” “Toast.” “Tuesday.” They show up, do their job, and leave. No fuss. No attention-seeking.

And then there are words that feel like they were created during a beef with humanity and the rest of us are just stuck dealing with the fallout.

Take “parsimonious.” A word meaning frugal should not be that extravagant. It’s not tight-fisted. It’s verbose-fisted. And somehow, “verbose” is shorter than “parsimonious,” which feels like a serious design flaw. A genuinely frugal word would be small. Efficient. Economical with letters. That feels like a reasonable expectation. But “parsimonious” keeps going. Every time you think it’s finished, another syllable appears from around the corner carrying luggage.

And then there’s “pulchritude.” Allegedly a word meaning beauty. Absolutely not. That is not the sound beauty makes. Beauty sounds soft. Beautiful things have vowels in sensible places. “Pulchritude” sounds like the sort of thing medieval doctors blamed on “bad air.” It sounds damp. You don’t compliment someone’s pulchritude. You discreetly ask whether antibiotics are involved.

Some words are just silly. “Queue.” Now this is nonsense I can respect. A queue is, fundamentally, just a line. A very simple concept. Yet the word itself contains four silent letters standing around doing absolutely nothing. Kind of like the poor suckers at the back of a line.

Q is carrying the entire operation on its back while U, E, U and E trail behind like middle management. It’s absurd. It’s inefficient. It looks like it should take several minutes and a French lesson to pronounce. And yet… there’s something almost impressive about it. That level of confidence isn’t a spelling choice. It’s a decision. A theatrical little power move.

English, as a language, often feels less like a system and more like a series of dares that got out of hand centuries ago. And “queue” embodies that perfectly. It knows it makes no sense. It simply refuses to care. And I love that.

Language is chaos. Some words just have the decency to admit it.

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A simple pleasure? Well, I suppose the obvious answer is coffee, but that feels too broad. That’s like saying your favorite part of being alive is “oxygen.”

No, the genuine pleasure is making a cup of coffee and then remembering, with the sort of quiet ecstasy usually reserved for religious visions, that you also have cookies.

Not the fancy cookies. In fact, the more expensive the cookie, the less trustworthy it becomes. I don’t want a cookie infused with Himalayan salted caramel and the emotional backstory of a Peruvian cacao farmer. I want an Oreo. A Chips Ahoy. A Nilla Wafer. A cookie that understands its role in society.

And there is a perfect moment, tragically brief, when the coffee is exactly the right temperature. Not lava. Not the disappointing lukewarm puddle it becomes because you got distracted reading an article about whether octopuses can recognize human faces. Just the perfect moment of ahhhh.

That moment lasts roughly four seconds. Human happiness often does. Which is perhaps why it’s so infuriating when someone talks to you during it.

“Lovely weather today.”

Is it? IS IT? I’m balancing a structurally compromised Oreo over hot liquid and trying to experience one microscopic flicker of peace before answering emails and eventually dying.

Let me have this.

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It’s strange what information school decides is important.

Because somehow I spent years learning about wars, several presidents with identical facial hair, and at least nine different dudes named Henry, yet nobody mentioned that Gladys West is the reason GPS exists.

That seems relevant.

Gladys West’s mathematical modeling of the Earth made modern GPS possible. Which means your phone knowing you’re somehow “2 minutes away” while you are emotionally and geographically lost in a Target parking lot? Yeah, Gladys West did that.

And the thing is, this wasn’t some tiny little contribution buried in a group project where everyone gets a participation sticker. Her work was foundational to GPS technology. She helped change the way humans navigate the planet.

Which feels pretty significant for someone most people have never heard of.

And there’s Margaret E. Knight, who invented the machine that makes flat-bottom paper bags. Sounds simple until you realize she fundamentally changed how everyday shopping works. The entire rhythm of carrying things home from a store assumes that bags can stand up, hold weight, and not immediately collapse into a tragic origami situation.

Before her invention, paper bags were envelope-style or flimsy v-shaped containers that weren’t especially useful for much beyond carrying lightweight items like loose tea, hard candy, or anything you were willing to transport with a hopeful disregard for physics.

Then Margaret came along and invented the machine that created the sturdy flat-bottom grocery bags we still use now. So every time you carry home groceries, takeout, or twelve candles you absolutely did not need from Bath and Body Works, that’s because of her.

And honestly, I love her a little.

Just a quick side note because I refuse to make men the main characters of this story… a man did try to steal her invention because apparently audacity has never required qualifications.

His argument was essentially: “No one would ever believe a woman could possibly invent this.” Which is extra funny because she then took him to court and won. Imagine publicly underestimating someone that badly. At that point you should have to go live under a rock forever.

What gets me about women like Gladys West and Margaret Knight is that their inventions became so normal that we stopped noticing the genius behind them.

GPS just exists now. Paper grocery bags just exist now.

History is full of women who quietly built enormous pieces of modern life while receiving about 3% of the recognition they deserved.

And honestly, once you start noticing it, you can’t stop.

You start realizing civilization is basically held together by overlooked women and one exhausted cashier named Linda.

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Life throws you lemons. It’s an inescapable fact of… well, life. And at some point,  you’re going to need someone who can help you decide between lemonade and a whiskey sour. I have a small, but very select, highly discerning circle for just such an occasion.

It’s my cat, Luffy.

Now, before you roll your eyes at me, just know that Luffy is an exceptional listener. Truly world-class. You can sit there and pour out your deepest concerns – career dilemmas, relationship questions, existential crises – and he will stare at you with an intensity that suggests he is either processing every word… or calculating whether you might be edible. I’m not 100% convinced it’s not the latter.

And the beauty of his advice is its objectivity. Utter, pristine objectivity. Because he has no emotional investment whatsoever. He doesn’t care how things turn out for you. As long as his meals arrive on time and the general standard of cushion softness is maintained, your life choices are largely your own affair.

This makes his guidance refreshingly direct.

“Should I text him back?”
Blink.
Interpretation: “Do as you wish, but this seems beneath you. Also, feed me.”

“Brenda in Accounting annoyed me today.”
Slow tail flick.
Interpretation: “Unacceptable. Eliminate her. But feed me first.”

To his credit, Luffy’s worldview is… streamlined. He is, at his core, entirely cat. His moral philosophy ranges from “ignore it” to “knock it off the table and see what happens.” There isn’t much middle ground.

He is also, and I say this with respect, deeply petty. If someone has wronged him, even slightly, he will remember. Oh, he will remember. Hours later, days later, at 3 a.m., when you least expect it, justice will be delivered in the form of a dramatically timed sprint straight across your face. Or worse. A nighttime deposit in your slipper.

And honestly? I admire that commitment to crazy.

So yes, when I need advice, I turn to Luffy. Not because he offers nuanced, human-centered solutions, but because he cuts through the noise. He reminds me that most problems can be simplified into three basic questions:

Is it worth my energy?
Can I ignore it?
Or should I metaphorically shove it off a surface and walk away?

It’s not traditional wisdom. It won’t get published in self-help books. But it is, in its own way, incredibly clarifying.

Also, he’s usually right, which puts him ahead of most experts.

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WordPress wants to know if I vote in political elections. First of all, I didn’t realize there were non-political elections available to me. Have I been ignoring the “Best Supporting Cousin” midterms or “Most Likely to Finally Fix Their Sleep Schedule” primary? Was there a referendum on whether chocolate should officially outrank peanut butter, and I missed it?

But yes, political elections. I do vote. At one time, enthusiastically. Determinedly. Now, it’s more with the frazzled energy of someone who suspects the alternative is waking up one morning to find the world has been replaced by a reality show judged by rabid raccoons. Spoiler alert: we’re there.

Because really, how can you not vote? Especially now, while the world is imploding. It’s the absolute bare minimum requirement for participating in society, like returning your shopping cart or pretending to understand how taxes work. It’s the one moment where you’re handed a pen (or a screen) and told, “Go on then, see if you can turn this enormous, wobbling ship away from the rocks.”

As you lovely readers know, I do try to keep things light. I’m not here to ruin anyone’s day. I mean, there are entire news networks professionally committed to that already. But even with my dedication to levity, it’s hard to ignore that the general trajectory of things feels less like “forward progress” and more like “confidently jogging toward a cliff while debating whether gravity is a hoax.”

And yet – and yet – you have to vote. Because not voting is essentially saying, “You know what, I’m fine with whatever happens,” which is a bold stance considering “whatever happens” increasingly resembles a slow-motion documentary titled How Did It Get This Bad?

Sure, things are a bit… Idiocracy-adjacent right now. Okay, maybe not so much adjacent as smack on point. But that’s precisely why voting matters. It’s not about immediate perfection, because God knows, that’s going to take decades once we’re out of this mess. No, at this point, it’s about nudging the wheel away from chaos and toward something resembling competence.

So yes, I vote. Not because I think it will instantly fix everything, but because the alternative is sitting on the sidelines while the world turns into a cautionary tale told by future historians.

Assuming we still have historians.

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