Posted in Cultural Commentary, Small Business Notes

Myth Phrases: The Language Business Owners Use to Avoid Deciding

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

Thirteen common business phrases — from “multitasking” to “self-starter” — tested against one question: good strategy, or an impatient entrepreneur avoiding a decision?

Some phrases show up in business so often that nobody questions them. I’m calling them myth phrases. They sound like descriptions of real conditions. Most of the time they’re excuses dressed up as strategy. The test for each one is the same: is this actually a good, deliberate business decision, or is it an impatient entrepreneur refusing to sit still long enough to choose?

“Multiple Competing Priorities”

This phrase comes from business owners who can’t choose. Some are scattered. Some have ADHD, and that plays into it. Some legitimately see several ways to reach a goal and can’t tell which is fastest, most sustainable, or lowest-friction. Whatever the reason, they can’t pick, so they say they have multiple competing priorities.

If two, three, or four things all sit at priority one, you have nothing at priority one. Skip that line and go to priority two. There’s probably only one item there, and that’s the one that matters, because it’s the one you can actually focus on.

Strategic or impatient? It’s never strategic to have four priority-ones. A real strategy produces a ranked list with one thing on top. “Multiple competing priorities” is what you say when ranking feels like loss — like admitting the other three don’t matter as much. That’s not a planning problem. That’s an attachment problem.

“Multitasking”

You cannot literally do two things at once. You cannot chop onions and fold underwear at the same time. When you say you’re cooking and doing laundry, what happened is this: you put the laundry in (task one), washed your hands, and started chopping onions (task two). Then you set the onions to cook and took a few more steps while the washer ran for 30 to 45 minutes. You alternated. You never did both at once.

Mental tasks work the same way. You cannot think about two things at the same time. You can alternate. I can say “candle, crystal, candle, crystal,” but I cannot say both words at exactly the same time with one mouth, one set of teeth, and one set of vocal cords.

Strategic or impatient? Multitasking isn’t a skill, so claiming it isn’t a strategy — it’s a cover story for not sequencing work. I prioritize efficiency. I want the most done in the least time so I can go do nothing. My Facebook memories still turn up posts like “door to door, an hour and 30 minutes, seven things done”: groceries, meds, a drop-off, a Marketplace pickup. That wasn’t multitasking. I picked a route — farthest stop first, work back toward home, straight line out, straight line back. My grocery list follows the store layout: produce, packaged goods, freezer, checkout. That’s organization. It’s structure and planning, done in advance, so the execution looks fast. Multitasking, as a word, erases the planning and pretends the speed happened by magic. It didn’t. The planning is the work.

If “multitasking” appears in a job description, run. Or, if you enjoy malicious compliance, ask in the interview: “Can you give me an example of how multitasking shows up? Who is literally thinking two things at once, speaking two things at once, or standing in two places doing two different things?” Let them explain that they mean something else.

“Fast-Paced Environment”

Usually sits right next to “multitasking” in the same listing. It’s code for wanting someone younger, who can be manipulated into accepting multiple priorities, attempting multitasking, burning out fast, and quitting. They’ll be cheap, so it’s fine.

Strategic or impatient? This one isn’t even the entrepreneur’s impatience — it’s institutionalized impatience, baked into hiring. A genuinely fast-paced business has fast, clear decision-making. A business that advertises “fast-paced” as a selling point usually has no decision-making at all — just constant reaction to problems nobody planned for. Speed without direction is just chaos with a better reputation.

“Low-Hanging Fruit”

We say low-hanging fruit when we mean the easy, gullible clients. The phrase makes targeting the least-informed, least-able-to-push-back customer sound like smart resource allocation instead of what it is.

Strategic or impatient? There’s a real version of this — the quick win that funds the harder work. That’s legitimate triage. But look past the immediate sale. A gullible client is gullible because they can’t evaluate what they’re buying, which means they also can’t evaluate whether it worked. Short term, that looks like free money: low effort, fast close, no pushback. Long term, it’s the client most likely to feel misled once they figure out what happened, most likely to leave a bad review, most likely to chargeback or demand a refund, and least likely to refer anyone, because they don’t have the standing in their own network to vouch for a purchase they’re privately unsure about. “Low-hanging fruit” measures effort to close. It doesn’t measure what that client costs you six months later. Most of the time “low-hanging fruit” doesn’t mean efficiency. It means picking a mark and not pricing in the cleanup.

“Above and Beyond”

Unpaid work presented as a virtue. The job or contract already defines what “and” covers. “Beyond” is whatever nobody wants to pay for. And this is the phrase that implicitly allows for a performance review policy where a 3 out of 5 is the average performance score across the company and no one ever gets a 5 – because there’s always something “beyond” whatever you just did that was “beyond.”

Strategic or impatient? Neither, really — this is about the entrepreneur’s unwillingness to scope the work correctly the first time. If the work is required, it belongs in scope and in price. If it isn’t required, it’s a favor, and a favor has to be voluntary to be a favor. “Go above and beyond” is a request for free work wearing a compliment as a disguise.

“Other Duties as Assigned”

This is “above and beyond” with a contract clause attached. It’s the line at the bottom of a job description that lets a boss expand scope indefinitely without ever expanding compensation to match. Every task that doesn’t fit cleanly anywhere else gets filed under it, forever, with no renegotiation trigger.

Strategic or impatient? It’s the same unpaid-scope problem as “above and beyond,” just written down in advance and pre-authorized. At least “above and beyond” has to be asked for, in the moment, by a person who can be pushed back on. “Other duties as assigned” removes the asking. The scope creep is already signed off on before the job even starts.

“Wearing Many Hats”

Said about small-business and startup roles like it’s a perk. What it usually means is one salary covering several jobs that should be several salaries, or at least several line items in a budget.

Strategic or impatient? There’s a real version early in a business, when there’s genuinely no budget for five separate hires and one person has to cover the gaps out of necessity. That’s a resourcing constraint, not a myth. It becomes a myth the moment the business can afford to split the roles and doesn’t, and keeps calling it a hat collection instead of understaffing.

“We’re Like a Family”

Said in onboarding, said in the culture deck, said right before someone is asked to skip their kid’s recital for a deadline. Families don’t fire you. Families don’t performance-review you. A business relationship that’s actually like a family would include job security and unconditional loyalty in both directions, and it never does.

Strategic or impatient? Not a business decision at all — it’s a manipulation tactic, dressed as warmth, used to get people to accept conditions (unpaid overtime, blurred boundaries, guilt-based retention) that they’d refuse if the relationship were correctly described as transactional.

The caveat here is that some families are exactly like that, and it’s not a compliment. Toxic families fire people too — they just call it being cut off, written out of the will, or uninvited from Thanksgiving. Members quit those families constantly — it’s called going no contact, and it’s the same severance as walking out of a bad job with no notice. And plenty of families run performance reviews already, they just don’t use the term: the running commentary on your weight, your choices, your partner, your parenting, delivered as “concern,” is a performance review with worse boundaries and no HR department. So “we’re like a family” isn’t even false advertising. For a lot of people, it’s an accurate description of exactly the dynamic they’re being asked to recreate at work — and that’s the problem, not the slip-up.

“Self-Starter”

A job posting phrase that means: there is no training program, no onboarding documentation, and no manager with time to manage you. You’re expected to figure out the job by doing it, with the risk of early mistakes placed entirely on you.

I worked for one company in my past that explicitly stated – coached management to believe – that rockstars in a particular line of roles would “train themselves.” Turns out this was code for will seek out and pay for themselves to go through training because the company didn’t actually value that job. This same company also directly advised specific hourly/salary ranges form 2000-2020 for this role that aligned more with a 1970s female secretary idea of compensation.

Strategic or impatient? Impatient — and worse than that, it’s a PIP that started before day one. A real PIP at least has the decency to come after a failure, with documented specifics about what went wrong. “Self-starter” skips all of that and front-loads the failure into the job description itself. The employer never defines what success looks like, never explains the unwritten systems, never hands over the context that would let a new hire actually start fast. Then, three months in, the gaps in that undocumented knowledge get read back to the employee as a performance problem — as if not knowing the thing nobody told them were a character flaw instead of a training failure. “You should have figured that out” is the employer taking their own lack of specificity and repackaging it as the employee’s lack of initiative. The job was never “start without guidance.” The job was “read our minds, and if you can’t, that’s on you.” That’s not autonomy. That’s liability transferred from the employer, who had the information, to the employee, who didn’t.

“Quick Call” / “Quick Question”

Never quick. The word “quick” is doing the work of avoiding the real ask, which is: an unscheduled interruption, scope undefined, duration undefined, on someone else’s calendar, right now.

Several years ago, as a thank you to one of my favorite coaches, I was honored to share a pink, sparkly hourglass gift, and she posted about this very topic:

Strategic or impatient? Impatient, specifically about scheduling. If it were actually quick, it wouldn’t need the word in front of it — it would just be asked. “Quick” is a pre-apology for taking more time than the asker is willing to name up front.

Some leaders have made a bit out of this, and it’s worth telling on them. There are managers who keep a literal hourglass or a phone timer on their desk and start it the moment someone opens with “got a minute?” or “quick question.” It’s played as a joke, a little team legend, ha-ha-look-how-busy-I-am. But it’s not a joke, it’s a confession. A person who needs a physical prop to track whether a conversation stayed under sixty seconds has already told you the real answer to “got a minute?” — no, and they resent being asked. The honest version of that interaction is a closed door, a “not now,” or a scheduled time later today. The hourglass version lets them perform open-door availability and punish you for using it, in the same gesture.

“Just Circling Back”

An unanswered request, restated, with “just” doing the work of pretending this is light and easy rather than a second ask after the first one got ignored. It lets the sender avoid naming what actually happened: nobody responded.

This phrase always brings to mind the 10-foot long spiral telephone cord I grew up with on the single house phone landline. Specifically, I remember the kinks – because in this analogy, that’s what stops the cycle.

Strategic or impatient? Not strategy at all — it’s conflict avoidance. A direct version would say “you didn’t respond to my last message, following up.” “Circling back” removes the accountability from both sides: the sender doesn’t have to say they’re chasing something, and the recipient doesn’t have to acknowledge they dropped it.

“Hustle Culture”

The myth that constant motion is the same thing as progress, and that exhaustion is proof of commitment rather than a sign the business lacks process. Hustle gets treated as a personality trait to admire instead of a symptom to investigate.

The other version of this phrase carries IMO more insidious implications – specifically “the side hustle.” The “side” part has always bothered me in it’s diminution of value, importance, validation to the person running it. It’s a very “female” thing to do, which aligns since it’s usually women who need to make more money – both single and partnered women – to achieve financial equity with their male counterparts. Especially in a hetero marriage, it’s the woman giving up her time and energy on a “side hustle” or additional part time (or second full time) job to bring more money into the marriage. In this way, “side hustle” skews “female,” making this is hot button gender equality issue for many.

Strategic or impatient? The clearest case of impatience on the whole list. A business running well doesn’t need anyone to hustle, because the work is sequenced, scoped, and resourced correctly. Hustle is what fills the gap when none of that happened. It’s not dedication — it’s the cost of not planning, paid in someone’s hours.

“At a High Level”

A way to sound informed without committing to anything specific. It means the speaker hasn’t done the work, doesn’t have the numbers, or doesn’t want to be held to the details.

Strategic or impatient? Impatient, almost every time. A high-level summary is useful when it’s a deliberate compression of detail you already have. It’s a myth phrase when it’s the only altitude the speaker has ever flown at. Ask for the next level down. If the answer is another “at a high level,” there is no next level. The summary was the whole thing.

The Common Thread

Every one of these phrases lets a business owner, or a business, skip a decision and call the skipping a method. “Multiple priorities” skips ranking. “Multitasking” skips sequencing. “Fast-paced” skips process. “Low-hanging fruit” skips accounting for long-term cost. “Above and beyond” and “other duties as assigned” skip scoping and pricing the actual work. “Wearing many hats” skips hiring. “We’re like a family” skips honesty about the relationship. “Self-starter” skips training. “Quick call” and “quick question” skip scheduling. “Circling back” skips accountability. “Hustle culture” skips the planning that would make hustling unnecessary. “At a high level” skips the analysis.

None of them are strategies. They’re all the same impatience, wearing a dozen different outfits.

The test is always the same: ask for the literal, concrete version. Ask who’s doing what, in what order, for how much, and with what detail. If the phrase collapses the second you ask that question, it wasn’t a decision. It was a way of avoiding one.

Posted in Crystal and Divination Work, Cultural Commentary

Sun, Moon, Rising: The Three Charts You’re Actually Carrying Around

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

Sun sign, moon sign, and rising sign explained — what data each one needs, where the system comes from, and how to read all three together.

Someone asked me my moon sign recently. I didn’t know what that meant. I’ve been doing crystal work for thirty years and I did not know my moon sign, which tells you something about how compartmentalized my metaphysical education has been. So I Googled it, worked it out, and got an answer that turned out to be half right. That’s usually how it goes with astrology: everybody knows their sun sign, almost nobody knows the other two, and the explanations floating around the internet are either dumbed down to uselessness or written for people who already have a chart in front of them.

Here’s the actual breakdown, and here’s mine.

Three Signs, Three Different Questions

“What’s your sign?” is really three separate questions wearing a trench coat.

Sun sign is the one everyone means by default. It’s determined by where the sun appeared to be positioned against the backdrop of the zodiac on the day you were born. Because the sun moves through roughly one sign per month, your sun sign only requires your birth date. This is the sign in the horoscope column, the one on the mug, the one people mean when they say “I’m a Scorpio.” In the traditional framework, it represents core identity — the central character, the thing that stays consistent.

One disclaimer, because it comes up every few years and someone will bring it to me eventually: there is no second, newer zodiac that quietly replaced this one. The rumor is about a constellation called Ophiuchus, the “serpent-bearer,” which sits on the ecliptic between Scorpio and Sagittarius. The Babylonians knew it existed and left it out on purpose, because they wanted twelve equal slices to match a twelve-month calendar, not thirteen unequal ones. NASA’s Space Place — a science-education site for kids, not an astrological authority — ran an old post explaining this, and it resurfaces on social media roughly every two years framed as “NASA just changed your sign.” It didn’t. Astronomy and astrology are different systems, NASA studies the former, and the twelve-sign tropical zodiac this post is built on hasn’t moved. For the actual debunk, Autostraddle’s explainer and CNN’s coverage of the recurring hoax both walk through it clearly.

Moon sign requires more information and gets talked about a lot less. The moon moves through the zodiac in about 27 days, not 12 months, which means it changes signs every two to three days. Your sun sign is fixed for a full month; your moon sign can flip in an afternoon. That’s why knowing yours requires a birth date and a reasonably accurate birth time — get the day wrong by a few hours near a sign change and you get a different answer. Traditionally, the moon sign is read as the emotional and instinctive layer: how you process feeling, what you do when nobody’s watching, the internal weather system underneath the public-facing sun sign.

Rising sign, also called the ascendant, is the one nobody explains well. It’s the zodiac sign that was rising on the eastern horizon at the exact moment and place of your birth. The Earth completes a full rotation every 24 hours, so the horizon’s position relative to the zodiac shifts constantly — the rising sign can change every two hours. This is the one that demands all three pieces of data: date, precise time, and location, because latitude and longitude change what’s on the horizon just as much as the clock does. Traditionally, the ascendant is treated as the outward presentation — the first impression, the mask, the way you come across before anyone gets past the surface.

Put together, the shorthand some astrologers use is

Sun is who you are,
Moon is who you are alone,
Rising is who people think you are before you open your mouth.

I’m not fully signing off on that framework as gospel, but it’s a useful way to keep the three straight, and it explains why “sun sign” astrology — the kind in the horoscope column — is such an incomplete picture. It’s one-third of the data set, and it’s the one-third that requires the least information to calculate, which is exactly why it’s the one that got mass-marketed.

What It Actually Takes to Find Yours

This is the part that trips people up, including me a few weeks ago:

  • Sun sign: birth date. That’s it. The sun’s position is stable enough across a full day that unless you were born within hours of the calendar flipping from one sign to the next, the date alone settles it.
  • Moon sign: birth date plus birth time. The moon moves fast enough that date alone isn’t reliable — you can be born on the same day as someone and land in a different moon sign depending on the hour.
  • Rising sign: birth date, birth time, and birth location. This one is entirely dependent on the local horizon at a specific moment, which means the same birth minute in two different cities produces two different ascendants.

The rising sign is why “I don’t know my exact birth time” is a real obstacle in astrology circles and not just an excuse. Without a documented time, down to reasonable precision, and a location, the ascendant can’t be calculated at all — you’d be guessing at which of twelve signs happened to be crossing the horizon in a window that moves every couple of hours.

Where Any of This Comes From

None of this is New Age invention. The underlying system is old, and it didn’t originate as a personality quiz.

The zodiac — the practice of dividing the sky into twelve segments and naming them after constellations — comes out of Babylon, in Mesopotamia, roughly the first millennium BCE. Babylonian astronomer-priests were tracking planetary movement against a fixed set of constellations for calendrical and omen purposes long before anyone was assigning personality traits to it. The twelve-sign zodiac they developed is the direct ancestor of the one still in use.

The leap from astronomy to astrology-as-personal-destiny happened in Hellenistic Egypt, after Alexander’s conquests merged Babylonian astronomical tradition with Egyptian and Greek thought, centered in Alexandria. This is where the idea of a birth chart — a snapshot of the sky at the moment of an individual’s birth, used to say something about that individual specifically — took shape. The Greeks contributed the mythology: the zodiac constellations are named for figures out of Greek myth — the bull, the twins, the scales, the scorpion, the archer, the fish — and those origin stories are baked into how each sign is still described today.

The system got its major written codification from Claudius Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian scholar working in Alexandria in the 2nd century CE. His text, the Tetrabiblos, laid out the astrological framework — signs, houses, planetary rulerships — in a form structured enough that it became the reference point for astrology across the Mediterranean and, later, the Islamic world and medieval Europe. Astrology moved through Persian and Arab scholarship during the medieval period, where it was preserved and expanded alongside astronomy, before re-entering Europe through Latin translation.

One distinction worth knowing if you’re going to talk about this with any precision: the zodiac used in Western astrology — the one that produced my Scorpio sun — is the tropical zodiac, anchored to the seasons and the position of the sun relative to the equinoxes, not to the actual current position of the constellations in the sky. Vedic astrology (Jyotish), out of the Indian subcontinent, uses a sidereal zodiac, which tracks the actual constellations and has drifted from the tropical system over the centuries due to the Earth’s axial precession. Ask someone their sign in a Western context and a Vedic context and you can get two different answers for the same birthday. They’re not both wrong — they’re two different reference systems built on the same original Babylonian foundation.

The Chart, Since I Went to the Trouble

Birth data: some day in late October, mid-morning, on the northern side of the southeast Atlantic coast of the US — Eastern time. Daylight saving time had already ended for the year by my birth date in my birth year, so that’s a straight Eastern Standard Time reading, no ambiguity about which hour it refers to.

Run against that data:

  • Sun sign: Scorpio. Correct on the one thing I already knew.
  • Moon sign: Virgo.
  • Rising sign: Sagittarius.

That last one is the correction to make out loud. When this came up originally, the answer Google and I landed on was “Virgo moon rising,” which collapses two separate placements into one phrase. Moon and rising are not the same axis, and mine don’t match — the moon is in Virgo, the ascendant is in Sagittarius. It’s an easy conflation to make when you’re new to reading a chart, since both terms show up back-to-back and neither gets explained in the places most people first encounter them. Now I know better, and so does anyone reading this who’s about to make the same mistake.

Scorpio sun, Virgo moon, Sagittarius rising. Three different questions, three different answers, and it took a birth certificate’s worth of information to get all three.

What Each Sign Actually Carries

Since all three of these are mine now and not just an abstraction, here’s what the tradition assigns to each — traits, strengths, the anxieties that come attached, and the correspondences (color, stone, element, mythological figure) that show up across astrology and crystal work alike.

Scorpio (Sun) — Water, ruled by Mars/Pluto

  • Traits: intense, magnetic, private, strategic, perceptive to the point of unsettling other people
  • Strengths: resilience, loyalty once earned, investigative depth, emotional courage — willingness to go into the dark room other signs avoid
  • Weaknesses / anxieties: jealousy, control issues, difficulty trusting, a tendency to hold grudges and read betrayal into ambiguous situations
  • Colors: deep red, black, maroon
  • Stones: obsidian, garnet, malachite, black tourmaline
  • Mythological figure: Hades/Pluto, ruler of the underworld — the sign most associated with death, transformation, and what’s hidden beneath the surface

Virgo (Moon) — Earth, ruled by Mercury

  • Traits: analytical, meticulous, practical, modest, oriented toward being useful
  • Strengths: precision, reliability, discernment, a work ethic that doesn’t need supervision
  • Weaknesses / anxieties: perfectionism, overcriticism turned on self and others, anxiety rooted in loss of control, a habit of overthinking small details into large problems
  • Colors: hunter green, navy, earth tones
  • Stones: moss agate, amazonite, peridot, citrine
  • Mythological figure: Astraea, the virgin goddess of justice and harvest who, in one version of the myth, ascended to the stars and became the constellation Virgo when she abandoned a corrupted earth — also linked to Demeter/Ceres, goddess of the harvest

Sagittarius (Rising) — Fire, ruled by Jupiter

  • Traits: adventurous, philosophical, blunt, optimistic, allergic to being fenced in
  • Strengths: honesty, big-picture vision, enthusiasm that’s genuinely contagious, a broad-mindedness that resists small thinking
  • Weaknesses / anxieties: restlessness, tactlessness, commitment aversion, a tendency to overpromise and then need an exit
  • Colors: deep blue, purple, turquoise
  • Stones: turquoise, lapis lazuli, sodalite, amethyst
  • Mythological figure: Chiron, the centaur — unlike most centaurs in Greek myth, wise and civilized rather than chaotic, known as a teacher and healer, which fits an ascendant that’s the first thing people meet before they get to the rest of the chart

Does this remind you of anything? If you’ve ever taken a “personality” assessment (likely for a job), this might feel very similar, especially in the output. Things like DISC with it natural and adaptive styles of communication feels very much like the three angles from which you can be seen. I see some Enneagram references in here as well. In some ways, astrology is the original personality test.

Posted in Cultural Commentary, Everyday Musings

The Three Happiness Questions Nobody Asked Me

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

A response to Oxford’s World Happiness Report: three “happiness questions” that assume you’re partnered, trusting by default, and flush enough to give — and leave the rest of us out.

Inc.com ran a piece this week distilling the 2025 World Happiness Report into three questions that supposedly predict life satisfaction better than money or success. Eat meals with other people. Expect strangers to be trustworthy. Do things for other people. Answer yes to all three and, according to Oxford’s data, you’re happier than the people chasing a raise.

I read all three and thought: this is a survey built by and for a very specific person. Partnered. Extroverted by default. Financially stable enough that generosity is a free choice rather than a math problem. Socially trusting because nothing ever taught them otherwise. That’s not most people. It’s certainly not me.

Question one: eat with other people

No.

Eating alone, in public, with no one to coordinate around, is one of the more reliably pleasant parts of my week. The article frames solo meals as a loss — missed connection, missed networking, missed happiness you didn’t know you were leaving on the table. What it doesn’t count is what a shared meal actually costs to produce. Making plans and then having to break them. Working around someone else’s dietary restrictions or medical needs — timing a meal around a dining companion’s diabetes management, for instance, means the food itself becomes a coordination problem before anyone’s taken a bite, because insulin gets dosed against what’s actually delivered, not against what the menu implied it would be. Add in managing conversation, gauging whether the other person’s having a good time, and reading a room while also trying to eat in it.

Then there’s the part the survey has no column for. I’m a recovering anorexic of almost forty years. Eating in front of someone is never just eating. There’s a background process running the entire meal, tracking whether the person across from me is clocking what’s on my plate, whether they think I should have ordered something else, whether they’re doing math about my body while I’m doing math about my body. That process doesn’t turn off because the research says shared meals correlate with happiness. It’s exactly the mechanism the research is asking me to opt back into, framed as self-improvement.

Solo meals aren’t a consolation prize. For a lot of people, they’re the only version of eating that isn’t also a performance.

Question two: expect strangers to be trustworthy

What.

I’m Gen X. Stranger danger wasn’t a suggestion, it was the entire curriculum. Nobody under fifty was raised to assume the person they don’t know is safe by default, and treating that instinct as a happiness deficiency gets the causality backwards. The examples the article reaches for — ride-share, in-home services, marketplace platforms — aren’t evidence that people trust strangers. They’re evidence that an entire economy got built specifically because people don’t. Uber doesn’t run on faith. It runs on ratings, GPS tracking, background checks, and a review layer that exists precisely so nobody has to extend blind trust to anybody. That’s not trust. That’s trust infrastructure, built by companies that understood the default answer was no and monetized closing the gap.

Conflating “I’ll use a platform with five layers of accountability built in” with “I generally expect strangers to be trustworthy” is doing a lot of quiet work in that research question. They’re not the same disposition. One is caution with guardrails. The other is the thing I was specifically trained out of by 1985.

Question three: be kind to others

Here’s where the neurodivergent point comes back around, because it always does: volunteering, donating, and “helping strangers” all assume a baseline of social bandwidth and extroverted engagement that isn’t universal, and treating that baseline as the default path to happiness quietly pathologizes anyone whose brain doesn’t run that way.

But set that aside, because the bigger problem is economic, not psychological. This research keeps getting used as a stand-in for the happiness of the average person at the exact moment the average person is single, in a K-shaped economy, watching the middle class shrink in the rearview mirror. Prices are outrunning inflation. Compensation is lagging behind it, even for people who did everything right and stayed salaried. Benefits are getting trimmed. Pricing structures across housing, insurance, and household costs were built around two incomes and haven’t adjusted for how many people are now running a household on one. “Live within your means” only works if your means hold still. When price keeps outrunning what you’re paid, your means shrink every year — a second job, a side hustle, just to keep living within them. Eventually the means shrink enough that you can’t even afford to move somewhere cheaper. There’s nothing left over for a place where donating feels like an option again.

Telling that person their happiness is one volunteer shift away isn’t wrong because it’s unkind. It’s wrong because it’s not describing their economy.

The gap

Three questions, one implied profile: partnered enough to always have a dinner companion, safe enough in their formative years to default to trust, and flush enough in time or money that generosity is a choice rather than a luxury. Introverts, single people, independent people, and anyone currently underwater just don’t show up in that model — not because they’re less happy, but because the questions were never built to find out.

A wooden bowl on a pedestal holds rice, herbs, and crystals. It is flanked on the left by a moss agate crystal tower and on the right by a glass votive holder with a green candle that is lit.
Posted in Crystal and Divination Work

I Built a Money Bowl. Here’s What That Actually Looked Like.

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

This isn’t a how-to. I’m not teaching anyone anything, and I’m not claiming any kind of expertise I haven’t earned. I made a money bowl for the first time, and this is what I did.

In cooking mise en place style, I lined up the ingredients for the money bowl roughly in the order I would use them.

Why This Bowl, Why Now

I’m saving for a move to Anchorage. $10,000 to $15,000, target date May 2027 — enough to cover the drive, Zoey, and landing somewhere without scrambling. A money bowl isn’t a financial plan. It’s a physical, repeatable anchor for a goal I’m already working toward by other means. That’s the whole function it serves here.

What Went Into It

Wooden bowl because wood grows the way I want my fund to grow, wide enough that the rice actually forms a base layer instead of a thin scatter on the bottom.

Rice first, filling it about halfway — the foundation, the part everything else sits in rather than on. Then rosemary and thyme, crushed lightly between my fingers rather than ground, scattered over the rice, with two or three whole cinnamon sticks laid in after.

The crystals came next, nested into the rice so most of them stay visible rather than buried: moss agate chips, green aventurine, pyrite, citrine, tiger’s eye, malachite, flower agate. I specifically arranged these in a made up grid:

  • green aventurine in the center (as recommended in the instructions below)
  • pyrite – two pieces with one above and one below – 12 and 6 if you like clock face markers
  • citrine in the upper right and tigers eye opposite in the lower left – for confidence and courage to be disciplined enough for this big goal
  • malachite in the upper left and flower agate opposite in the lower right – to protect the accumulation that follows attraction and the patience to nurture growth
  • hematite above and below the pyrite at 12 and 6 – protection
  • green fluorite and clear quartz just above 9 and 3 – for clarity and focus on the intention
  • sunstone and unakite just below 9 and 3 – for peace and balance around the journey, both the financial building as well as the physical and life journey this money is intended for
Overhead shot of the finished “crystal grid” of my money bowl. The list above tells what is placed where and why.

I took one bay leaf and wrote the intention on it in shorthand before adding it — a pin works, so does a fine marker. Mine said what it needed to say: the number, the place, the month. That leaf went in the center, intention-side up. Coins extending the X of the grid, heads-up — heads is the active/”yes” orientation in this practice, tails is more for closing or banking a working, and this one is neither closed nor banked yet. As my fund grows, I’ll add more coins closer and closer to the bay leaf in the center to mark progress towards meeting the goal.

Candle beside the bowl, not in it. Green, lit at setup and any time I refresh the bowl.

Saying It Out Loud

No spell, no script. Just a direct statement while the candle burned, in my own words, naming the number and the month and what it’s for. That’s the part that matters — specific, plain, said like I meant it, not recited. I literally spoke the things I know will take funds as well as my fear about how much this costs against the benefits to my life.

A wooden bowl on a pedestal holds rice, herbs, and crystals. It is flanked on the left by a moss agate crystal tower and on the right by a glass votive holder with a green candle that is lit.
My money bowl for saving and growing the funds I need for a safe move from Florida to Alaska next year.

Where It All Came From

I want to be sure to share how/from where I gathered these materials because it can feel like 1) you have to have the exact, perfect set of tools or ingredients and 2) it costs a lot of money. While retain establishments are certainly looking to make a profit, that doesn’t mean you have to get expensive pieces.

  • Avalon, Orlando, FL — https://avalonbeyond.com/ – malachite and unakite – these were some of my first tumble purchases earlier this year when I started working with crystals.
  • Mystic Minerals, Orlando, FL — mysticmineralsmarket.com – The candle and the moss agate tower — the tower sits just outside the bowl rather than in it, part of a Mystic Minerals mystery box, intuitively picked for me earlier this year.
  • Magical Crystal Store, online, Pennsylvania — https://www.magickalcrystalstore.com/ – pyrite, clear quartz, flower agate, green aventurine, and moss agate chips all came from the monthly scoop bags and a mystery capsule order.
  • Stoneage Natural Rocks & Crystals, Orlando, FL — https://stoneageshops.com/ – sunstone and unakite – while not common to a money bowl, this is the stone I’ve chosen to represent my journey from the sunshine state of Florida to the frontier of Alaska.
  • Crystal Magic, Phoenix, AZ — https://crystalmagic.com/ – green fluorite – this was a freebie they added to my last order. IMO you can never have enough fluorite, green especially but any of the colors or rainbows.
  • Facebook Marketplace — tigers eye and citrine came from a handful of about 10 tumbles and larger carved shapes that I grabbed for $20. Check your local listings and, if you’re willing to pay shipping on something you can’t see/feel first, buy now listings; I’ve done both, but prefer to pick up locally so I can see and amateur-confirm that the stone is likely to be real.
  • Pantry and Jewelry Box — that’s where the herbs/spices came from; they are literally the jars from my cooking pantry. And the hematite beads are from a pair of earrings I bought at Black Market Minerals in Charleston, SC decades ago – just because I liked them.

Rice, rosemary, thyme, cinnamon, and the bay leaf all came out of the pantry. Nothing purchased for those; they’re staples I keep on hand regardless.

Every week Magickal Crystal Store offers mystery capsules in 3, 5, and 10 packs. This is a 3-pack and is where I got the moss agate chips for the refreshes over time.
Once a month, Magickal Crystal Store offers scoops with tumbles of various sizes and other items. From this bag, I used the flower agate and moss agate chips.
Once a month, Magickal Crystal Store offers scoops with tumbles of various sizes and other items. From this bag, I used the pyrite, clear quartz, and moss agate chips.
These are the intuitively chosen items from Mystic Minerals. I used the moss agate tower (green with white near the bottom) as part of my money bowl set up.

What Happens to It Now

It sits in my living room where I’ll actually see it every day, which matters more than the “correct” placement would.

The first refresh will occur on Mabon, September 22 in North American Eastern time zone. Then I’ll repeat the refresh on the first of each month – because it’s easy to remember: fresh rosemary and thyme crushed on top, a few new moss agate chips stirred in, a new cinnamon stick if the old ones have gone flat, candle relit, intention restated. The rice gets swapped out every few months before it goes stale; I’ll probably do this a Yule and again at Ostara (what Christians turned into Easter).

If real savings accumulate, real coins go in to match — the bowl is supposed to track what’s actually happening, not stand in for it.

You Don’t Have to Do It Any Particular Way

I identify as a crystal witch and a divination witch. That’s it. I don’t do herbs as their own practice, I don’t do spells beyond speaking an intention aloud, I don’t make potions, and I don’t do any of this for other people — no readings for hire, no services, witchy or otherwise. This is mine, for me.

There’s a version of this conversation happening right now across metaphysical creators online — people saying, correctly, that you don’t need a hereditary witch lineage to call yourself a witch. You don’t have to do everything the tradition offers. You don’t have to dedicate every hour or every dollar to it. You don’t have to know everything before you’re allowed to practice anything. You get to choose what you do, why you do it, and when.

I don’t follow moon cycles. I don’t follow the pagan calendar. Most people would expect the Greek zodiac to be optional too, and for a lot of practitioners it is. For me it isn’t — the Greek zodiac is actually the thing that shapes my choices most. I keep a working collection of stones associated with supporting Scorpio, my sign, as a water sign and for divination work specifically. The malachite and unakite in this bowl are the ties to Scorpio.

The Grimoire Page

I keep my practice records both electronically and printed out. I’ve added my grimoire pages for this for free download.

Download the Guide (PDF)

Posted in Cultural Commentary, Everyday Musings

Crone Era Early Admissions: I’ve Been in My Crone Era Since my 20s, but I Just Found the Word

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

Fifty, done with organized religion, and finally naming a lifelong pattern of choosing solitude, judgment, and mortality on her own terms. One woman’s case for the crone.

Earlier this week I was talking to my neighbor (F, 25-ish), who is roughly half my age, about what I’ve been watching lately. Vampire Diaries. I’m nearing the end of the series. She lit up — oh, you have to watch Originals next, oh, you have to watch Legacies. I told her I’d already seen both. In fact, I’d seen them first. I watched Legacies before I ever touched Vampire Diaries, got curious about Klaus Mikaelson’s backstory, went to Originals, and only then worked my way back to the beginning. I’ve been going backward through the whole thing on purpose, which is apparently not how anyone else does this.

Zoe (on the stool) and me watching a later season episode of Vampire Diaries.

She also asked if I’d seen Gilmore Girls. I told her that one aired a little after my time as a young adult — I was already past the demographic it was written for when it aired. Now I have to go back and watch it anyway, because I’ve spent twenty years watching most of that cast grow up and get better at their craft in other things, and there’s no reason not to close the loop.

None of that is the point. The point is what happened after she left: I sat with the fact that a conversation about teen vampire shows had somehow confirmed something I’d suspected for a while.

I don’t think I’m entering my crone era. I think I’ve been in it since I was much younger, and I only just found the word for it.

What Crone Actually Means

The maiden-mother-crone triad shows up across a lot of pre-Christian and folk traditions as a way of mapping womanhood in thirds, roughly tied to a woman’s relationship with fertility rather than to age or ungendered life experiences. The maiden is beginning — curiosity, discovery, a life not yet spent on anyone else. The mother is the productive middle — creation, caretaking, output, whether that’s children or work or anything else built for others to use.

The crone is the third phase, the one that arrives after the culture stops expecting fertility and production from a woman, and it gets read two very different ways depending on who’s doing the reading.

The unflattering version, the one baked into most fairy tales, treats the crone as used up — a woman past her use, cast off, shriveled, dangerous in a bitter way. The older, more honest version treats her as the one who’s finally free of the expectations that ran her first two-thirds, and dangerous in a completely different way: she has nothing left to prove and nothing left to lose, which means her judgment finally belongs entirely to her. She knows things because she’s outlived the point of performing for anyone. She’s associated with wisdom, with the ability to sit with death without flinching, with cutting straight past politeness to what’s actually true.

Artist: Crocula; Source

That second definition is the one I mean. Not withered. Unmanaged. I’m not describing a phase I’ve entered at fifty. I’m describing a way of operating that the culture doesn’t have a slot for until a woman is old enough that it stops trying to sell her something.

Judgment Is Not for Rent

I read constantly as a kid, which in the capital “S” Southern culture I was raised in meant one thing if you were a girl: you were going to be an English teacher. Not asked. Told. By everyone. I started college in that degree program, got into the program, and hated almost every minute of it — not the literature, the bureaucracy of the K-12 education system. A room full of people who had never met me deciding how I was supposed to think and what I was supposed to do with a skill I already had. I left the systemic education path but continued on exploring language and literature. The teaching I did in higher education and the teaching I do now in business, much later and in a completely different form, is mine.

There’s an older, heavier version of that same expectation that follows a lot of women: you are the eldest daughter, so you will be the one who manages your aging parents, financially and otherwise, no matter what that costs you. I’m not going to get into the specifics of that one here. What I’ll say is that I looked at what was actually being asked of me, weighed it honestly, and said no. That decision cost me a relationship a lot of people would have kept out of obligation. I don’t regret it.

Somewhere in between those two things sits something much smaller and much more physical. A few months after I turned fifty this year, I stopped shaving. Legs, underarms, all of it. I’d already been drifting that direction for a decade — weekly, then biweekly, then monthly — but this year I just decided to stop doing it at all. The hair grew in sparser than I expected and softer than I expected. I don’t feel it unless the wind picks up. I’m not making a statement when I shower. I’ve just stopped thinking about it, which might be the most honest measure of how little it ever mattered to me in the first place.

Even punishment when I was a kid came with an expectation attached, and I never met it. Getting grounded is supposed to feel like a loss — kids are supposed to want to run around and make noise and messes, want the TV, want the phone, and sulk when all of that gets taken away. Instead, grounding meant a closed door and permission to read in silence for as long as I wanted. When they took the phone away too, it barely registered.

None of these three things are the same size. But they’re the same shape. Somebody hands me an expectation with their confidence attached to it, and I check whether it actually serves me before I put it on.

Trusty Old Reruns

The shows and movies I go back to on purpose have a pattern I hadn’t clocked until I said it out loud: Big Bang Theory. Charmed. The old Roseanne, before the reboot muddied it. Hackers, from back when being a teenage computer expert on dial-up was genuinely disruptive. Goonies, because I had that exact childhood — a pack of kids building forts in the marsh behind our neighborhood and disappearing into our own version of an adventure nobody adult had sanctioned. Fast and Furious. Pitch Perfect. Harry Potter and the unfinished Fantastic Beasts run.

What ties them together isn’t nostalgia for its own sake. It’s that almost all of them center people who are marginalized, odd, or building something outside the system they were handed — witches, hackers, outsiders, a family that doesn’t look like the sitcom standard — and I go back to spend more time with them on purpose. Watching a show out of publication order, it turns out, was just a streaming algorithm doing its job. Rewatching is the actual habit, and it’s not about knowing what happens next. It’s about choosing, deliberately, whose company I want to keep for a few more hours.

I’d rather stay in on a weekend night in pajamas with a rerun with a predictable story arc and ending than go out for the sake of going out.

I know that reads as introverted at best and neurodivergent at worst to some people.

I’m fine with both readings.

The Church I Was Handed Back

Part of why this has been on my mind this particular week: the drag performer Jinkx Monsoon made news arguing that children shouldn’t be raised inside a single religion at all — that they should be left alone to explore belief once they’re old enough to actually choose it, with real consent, instead of having a faith installed before they’re capable of agreeing to it. The word doing the work there is “consent.” Every infant baptism, every confirmation, every first communion is a parent deciding what’s right and then installing it in a child who has no vote. That’s not a technicality. It’s the actual mechanism.

I’ve watched this play out at both extremes. One person close to me was raised Catholic, later questioned her gender identity in a way the church wouldn’t accept, and was rejected outright for it — a door closed permanently over something she didn’t choose and the church refused to make room for. Someone else I know spent years questioning his own gender identity and left religion early in life partly because of it, then later in life settled into a more traditional identity, got married, got baptized, and now practices comfortably. I’m not saying either path is wrong, or that you can’t leave and come back. What unsettles me is the size of the gap between those two outcomes and the question sitting underneath it: is a return to religion, at that point, a genuine belief, or is it the price of being accepted somewhere? “Acceptable” and “true” aren’t the same word, and I don’t think organized religion has ever reliably known the difference between them, especially not with children too young to ask the question themselves.

There’s one expectation I left out above because it’s bigger than the others and it deserves its own room: I was raised in the church, and I don’t practice any religion now. For clarity, I define “religion” as a systemic and observable set of rituals and doctrines accepted as fundamental to identifying as a [name of the religion or religious sect]. Religion is not limited to Judeo-Christian options or even to theistic options.

I was baptized as an infant into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and raised in one of the oldest continuously operating Lutheran congregations in the country, in Charleston. My mother’s family were Southern Baptist for generations before a family friend brought her to that Lutheran church instead, and it stuck hard enough that it became the church she was married in and the one she raised us in. My father, Southern Baptist by birth, never practiced anything in my lifetime; in him I have a model for agnosticism sitting across the dinner table from me my whole childhood, and he’s a perfectly good person. I was born on October 31, which is Reformation Day — the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his complaints to a church door in 1517 and launching the protestant reformation that would result in the establishment of the Lutheran church — and my mother took that as confirmation, literally, that she’d picked the right religion.

So I was raised to be Lutheran the way most kids raised in liturgical traditions are: infant baptism, Sunday school, no vote in the matter. In ninth grade I ran a small project, half school assignment and half genuine curiosity, visiting other kids’ churches and talking to their families about what they believed and why. That was the beginning of treating religion as something to investigate rather than something to inherit, though I didn’t have that language for it yet. And it’s a key reason that after confirmation, instead of continuing on into high school Sunday School and the youth group, I joined the choir instead — a small, quiet redirection that in hindsight was the first step out the door rather than further in.

College made it even more obvious. I went to a Lutheran college, one my home church had helped found, in a town built around it. I stopped going to church entirely. Not the weekly campus chapel, not a local church, nothing. I came back to church four years later while in my first bought of graduate school; again I joined a choir in a church I chose myself, and reconstructed years later how much of that was actually about the music. The second time I went through graduate school at that same university, I didn’t go back to church at all, for three years, and nothing about my life felt unfinished.

When I moved to New York, church became a way to build a social life in a city where I knew no one, and it worked, mostly through the choir again — the friends I made there were fellow paid singers, not members of the congregation. I even served on the church council and substituted as worship leader and sermonizer twice. I was good at it. The service is so patterned it’s easy to run once you know it. I can still recite the entire liturgy from memory. I can sing the cantering without opening the book. That’s pattern, not faith. Being good at leading it and finding it meaningful turned out to be two completely separate things, and I knew that even while I was up there doing it well.

The clearest moment came when I moved back to South Carolina to help with my parents and was expected to return to the church I grew up in. I couldn’t. Not because of doctrine — because of identity. To that congregation, I wasn’t a person; I was Marsha’s daughter, expected to be a younger copy of my mother. At a women’s retreat, someone called out that they needed Marsha’s daughter to come lead a song. I stood up and walked out. That was the hard stop. The next time I went to church, I had found two workable substitutes after that: a paid singing position at a Presbyterian church, which was a job, and membership somewhere large and casual enough that no one would ever ask me to lead anything or know who my mother was. Both let me be present without being claimed.

Then in 2020 I moved during COVID, and church simply stopped. No congregation to return to or establish a connection with, easy livestreams to half-watch instead of attend, and once that habit of engagement broke, it never came back. Two more moves came and went — a couple of visits in North Carolina, none at all in Virginia — and by the time I landed in Florida I was watching family navigate their own version of this: they’d left one church over its stance on nontraditional life choices and found a Lutheran congregation that welcomed the same people fully, in membership and in leadership, which mattered enough to them to make the switch. I went with them occasionally, filled in as the responsible adult getting the kids to church when their parents traveled, and enjoyed all of it exactly as much as you’d enjoy a pleasant, low-stakes social occasion. When those same kids, no longer needing the Lutheran church’s acceptance, drifted back toward the Catholic church that had pushed them out in the first place, I didn’t go with them. By 2025 I was telling my family plainly that I was done with church, even for the occasions they considered significant. My local family has accepted my choice.

What replaced it started around my fiftieth birthday in 2025. My birthday, that same October 31st my mother once read as proof of her own correct choice, is also Samhain — a pre-Christian holiday marking the turn toward the dark half of the year. I don’t celebrate it. I don’t ritualize it. But sometime around turning fifty I started taking seriously an idea I’d been circling for years: that the word “magic” and the word “faith” describe the same thing, and the only difference is which one your culture has agreed to protect.

Consider this example: Rose quartz is supposed to open you up to love, and I can’t prove how, scientifically, and that gets called magic. Wine and a piece of bread are supposed to become the actual body and blood of a man who never handed either out at a table for people to eat, literally or otherwise, and that gets called faith.

The rose quartz tower and rose quartz, white jasper, and ocean jasper spheres I have in my bathroom to help me start my day with love.

Both are claims about the unseen that nobody can produce evidence for. One of those claims used to get women burned. I’ve never been able to unsee that asymmetry once I saw it, and I have no patience left for a culture that spends December insisting one specific unprovable belief is the reason for the season while treating every other unprovable belief as a threat.

I used to think this started in the last year or two. Looking back at the ninth-grade project, I think it started closer to age fourteen or fifteen.

Domestic, Witchy, Wild — Same Thing

This year I expanded from quick refrigerator pickling, which is really just a fast infusion, into actual heat-processed canning/pickling and fermentation. Shelf-stable, not quick-fix. Partly that’s for its own sake. Mostly it’s practice — I’m preparing for a more frontier-oriented life in Alaska, where the growing season is short and intense and everything after it depends on what you preserved while you had the chance. But sometimes I find myself self-identifying as “the witch in the woods” when I’m doing things like this.

I don’t draw much of a line between domestic, witchy, wild woman, and frontier woman.

People sometimes hear “domestic” and picture a fifties housewife with her makeup on before her husband wakes up. That’s not it, and it’s not close. What I mean is something more basic: paying attention to the physical world around you, understanding what it offers, and bringing it into your house and your daily life instead of outsourcing all of it to a supply chain.

This week I made fire cider for the first time — the kind of thing that sits exactly at the intersection of all four of those words. It’s a folk remedy, it’s fermented, it’s built from what you have on hand rather than what a store sells you, and it assumes you’d rather understand how to take care of yourself than default to someone else’s version of the answer. It fit into the same week as a jar of something else preserving on the counter, which is more or less how my kitchen runs now.

Fire cider made 9/5/2026: tumeric, ginger, garlic, red onion, rosemary, thyme, lemons, oranges, cinnamon sticks, black peppercorns, whole cloves, apple cider vinegar.

The Ending Is a Fact, Not a Crisis

Here’s the part that actually convinced me the crone era isn’t a 2026 development.

In 2000, my grandfather was in a coma. The adult members of the family took shifts sitting with him. Eventually the hospital raised the question of turning off life support, and the decision landed on my grandmother, who couldn’t make it. It passed to her two daughters, who couldn’t agree with each other. As the oldest grandchild, it would have come to me next. When I understood where things stood, I said it plainly: if the decision comes to me, I will turn the machines off. His life was over. Keeping the equipment running past that point wasn’t kindness. It was practical, humane, financially sane, and true, all at the same time.

I’ve since told other people, in other families, that I’ll be that person for them too — the one who says the sentence out loud when everyone else is too tangled in their own grief or love or guilt to say it. That’s not coldness. It’s that I don’t carry the same emotional fog most people carry around death, so I can see the decision clearly enough to make it.

This week alone, Dolly Parton died, Tim Curry died, and Gloria Steinem died, all in their eighties or nineties, and the reaction online was somewhere between shock and outrage, as if any of that should have been avoidable. It wasn’t. Bodies end. Most of what we call medicine is organized around postponing that fact indefinitely, which is, by definition, insane — doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome, when the outcome has never once been different for anyone. The mind isn’t bound by that. Whatever people mean when they talk about someone’s spirit or their work outliving them, that part isn’t made of the tissue that’s going to fail. The body is a different category, and I’ve never had trouble telling the two apart.

I have benchmark ages where I stop and take stock of where I am — not to fix a number for my own death, but to check whether I’m still living the life I actually want. The next check-in is sixty, a little over nine years out. Between now and then, the job is to make sure that when I get there, I can genuinely be at peace with however much closer I am to the end. That’s not morbid. It’s the only planning that’s ever made sense to me.

The maiden-mother-crone framework predates the religion I was handed at birth by a long way. So does the version of me that walked out of a women’s retreat rather than answer to my mother’s name, that had already decided to turn off a machine when two grown women couldn’t, that decided a rose quartz and a communion wafer are making the same unprovable claim and only one of them gets protected. I didn’t arrive at any of this in 2026. I just spent forty-nine years assuming it needed a better explanation than the one I already had. It didn’t. It needed a name, and the name is crone — not a phase I’ve entered, but the thing I was doing the whole time, before anyone had agreed to let me do it.

Posted in Crystal and Divination Work

Grouping Crystals for a Task: Sodalite and Fluorite for a Presentation

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

Today I gave a five-to-seven-minute update at an all-company meeting on a topic outside my professional expertise, one I still happen to own for this company. I do not write scripts. I build slides and let the visual carry part of the load, an old habit from years of teaching. For the nerves — not anxiety, just the low hum in the stomach — I paired two stones for the job.

A light green fluorite mushroom sat on the laptop, facing the screen I’d be presenting from. Fluorite sharpens focus, and it does not need to be touched to work, only present. A sodalite worry stone stayed in my hand, thumb working the indent, generating friction and heat. Sodalite supports clear communication, useful for someone who tends toward tangents and whose speech impediment can scramble word sounds under pressure.

Two stones, two jobs: one anchoring focus in the room, one steadying the words leaving my mouth. That is grouping — not a pile of favorites, but stones assigned to a task.

After the presentation, I took a moment to decompress with Facebook – with my flourite and sodalite pairing still on my laptop.

What Sodalite and Fluorite Do

Sodalite – Active.

A deep blue stone associated with clear thinking and precise communication. It is used for public speaking, writing, and any situation where the right word matters more than the most words. It works on logic and language, not volume.

Fluorite – Passive.

Prized for mental clarity and focus. It filters distraction and steadies concentration rather than generating energy of its own. Fluorite comes in several colors, and the color shifts the emphasis slightly — green leans toward heart-centered focus and decision-making, which is why I chose it here over a purple or clear piece.

Paired, the two stones cover language and attention at the same time: sodalite for what I say, fluorite for staying on task while I say it.

Who Am I – You Ask?

I have dabbled in crystal-based synergies for more than 30 years and made it my 2026 goal to intentionally develop and deepen my practice. I specialize in crystal groupings for nuanced situations and to address multiple needs simultaneously.

Illustration of a white magnolia bloom with a red rubber stamp reading "JUDGY" across it, header image for "I Am a Judgy Bitch (And I Love It)"
Posted in Cultural Commentary

I Am a Judgy Bitch (And I Love It)

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

This is my perspective. Yours may differ. I’m not asking you to agree — I’m asking you to notice.

We Don’t Judge

A year or so ago, everyone’s feed filled up with the same video format. Someone would sit in front of a camera, say some version of “we listen, and we don’t judge,” and then confess something — a belief, a habit, a choice — that they were bracing for the world to call controversial. Weird. Wrong.

The setup did the opposite of what it promised. If you have to announce that judgment is off the table before you speak, you’ve already told everyone in the room that judgment is exactly what’s coming. The disclaimer wasn’t protection. It was an admission.

I didn’t have a problem with the confessions. I had a problem with the premise. Because judgment isn’t the enemy here. Judgment is the entire operating system.

We Judge Constantly. We Just Rename It.

Your annual performance review is a judgment. Someone sat down, looked at what you did all year, and decided how good it was. They might call it an “evaluation” or “feedback” or “a data-driven assessment of your contributions,” but strip the euphemism and you’re left with the same act: a person deciding whether you were right or wrong, good or not good enough, and putting a number on it.

A test score is a judgment. A grade is a judgment. A performance rating, a Yelp review, a tenure decision, a “how did that landing look” from a judge holding up a card at a competition — all judgment, dressed in whatever costume makes it feel palatable for the room it’s in.

We don’t actually object to judgment. We object to the word. So we launder it. We call it “feedback” instead of criticism. We call it “assessment” instead of judgment. We call it “discernment” when we like the person doing it, and “judgmental” when we don’t. Same act. Different PR.

Roseanne did the best version of this I’ve ever seen, and it wasn’t even about judgment — it was about death, which runs on the identical mechanism. In “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home,” Jackie has to call a relative and tell her their father died. She can’t say it. She works through euphemism after euphemism — passed away, gone, not with us anymore — each one softer and each one failing to land, until the relative on the other end still doesn’t understand, and Jackie is finally reduced to shouting the plain words: dad’s dead.

It’s one of the funniest and bleakest scenes in the show’s run, and it works because it’s true: euphemism doesn’t actually protect anyone from the fact. It just delays the moment someone has to say the fact out loud. Judgment gets the same treatment. We circle it with softer words right up until the moment the plain one is the only thing left that’s actually clear.

Where the Fear Comes From

I think a lot of this traces back to a very old idea: Judgment Day. Christianity’s the easiest cultural driver to point to for a Western audience, but it’s nowhere near the only one. This isn’t a Christianity problem. It’s a species problem.

Ancient Egyptian belief weighed the heart on a literal scale against a feather, and a wrong verdict meant the soul got devoured on the spot. Islam has Yawm al-Qiyamah, the Day of Judgment, deeds read from a book and weighed — same bones as the Christian version, pass or fail, no partial credit. Zoroastrianism, which likely predates and influenced both, has the soul crossing the Chinvat Bridge: wide and easy for the righteous, razor-thin and impassable for everyone else. Judaism has its own version at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — being inscribed in the Book of Life or not — though it leaves more room for repentance and revision than the others do.

Different religions, different centuries, different continents, and they all independently landed on the same idea: a moment where you get judged, and the verdict is binary. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a pattern. Humanity keeps building the same myth because judgment — real, final, weighted judgment — is one of the load-bearing concepts in how we think about a life meaning anything at all.

But final judgment isn’t the model for the judgment we actually do all day. Final judgment is binary. A performance review has levels. A test has partial credit. A friend’s opinion of your choice isn’t a verdict on your soul — it’s one data point from one person. We inherited the terror of the word from the myth and then slapped it onto the mundane, everyday version, where it never belonged in the first place.

What We’re Actually Trying to Sell Instead

If judgment is off-limits, something has to replace it. And what we’ve replaced it with is easy.

Easygoing. Affable. Accommodating. Low-maintenance. Not a big deal. These are the traits we now market ourselves by — at work, with friends, in families, and especially, I’ve noticed, among other parents, where the fastest way to get frozen out of a group is to be the one who has opinions about anyone else’s kid. Being easy has become the social currency that judgment used to be measured against.

Here’s what’s actually underneath that trade. Judgment carries a real, structural risk: if I judge you and land on the bad side of it, we might not be friends. I might not tolerate your choice. There might not be a place for us to connect. That’s the actual stake people are avoiding when they perform “I don’t judge” — not the judgment itself, which they’re doing anyway, but the possibility of the conclusion costing them the relationship. Calling yourself easygoing lets you keep judging privately while advertising that the judgment will never cost anyone anything. It’s a promise of no consequences, not a promise of no verdict.

The Word That Gives It Away

If you want to catch judgment in the act, stop looking for the word “judgmental” and start listening for “should.”

“Should” is judgment’s most common disguise, and it’s a worse disguise than people think, because it isn’t really hidden at all. “You should do this.” “You should have done that.” Every single one of those sentences is a verdict about the gap between what a person did and what the speaker has decided was the correct action. That’s not description. That’s not neutral. That’s a judgment wearing a very thin coat.

I’ve got a favorite way of flagging it: say it as “shouldy” — like you’re saying “shitty” with a lisp. Don’t make a shouldy decision. It’s a little joke, but it’s doing real work, because it forces you to hear what “should” already smuggles in: a moral grade, dressed up as friendly advice.

Here’s a recent, unignorable example. On July 20, 2026, at a Cubs–Twins game at Wrigley Field, a fan stayed seated during the national anthem. A man sitting behind him leaned in, told him to stand, and struck him on the back of the head when he didn’t move. (source) The video went viral, and the online argument that followed was, almost word for word, a referendum on “should”: should you stand for the anthem, should you stand as a sign of respect, should you be legally required to stand. There is no law requiring spectators to stand, and the underlying choice not to is protected symbolic expression — but that hasn’t stopped the internet from litigating the moral question anyway, in exactly the vocabulary this essay is about.

Look at the sentence “you should stand for the national anthem.” That’s not a statement of fact. That’s a judgment, wearing the word “should” as its delivery mechanism, about a choice the speaker believes is morally correct — and a judgment, by implication, of everyone who chooses differently. And here’s mine, plainly, no “should” required: a man hit a stranger. Full stop. That’s battery. He should be arrested. Yes, that’s a “should” too — I’m not exempting myself from the mechanism, I’m just not pretending the word isn’t doing exactly what it always does.

Yes, I know that both men continued their discussion later, and the man who was seated during the anthem declined to press charges or allow security to remove the man who hit him.

Bless Your Heart

Nobody has ever formalized the art of judging someone while smiling at them quite like the American South did.

I grew up in it — capital-S Southern culture — and it runs on precisely this move. “Bless your heart” is not a blessing. It is a verdict, delivered in a register soft enough that the person can’t object without looking thin-skinned. It says: I’ve judged you, I’ve judged you unfavorably, and I’ve wrapped the judgment in enough sugar that you’ll thank me for it. It’s judgment with plausible deniability.

Steel Magnolias built an entire comic sensibility out of this. Clairee, played by Olympia Dukakis, has a line about wanting to be the one people bring their gossip to first — an invitation dressed as generosity, when it’s really an appetite for judgment served hot. Later, at Shelby’s wedding, she and M’Lynn watch a woman on the dance floor and land on a line comparing what they’re seeing to two pigs wrestling under a blanket, plus a dig about all that money spent on the dress and none of it on the undergarment to hold it in.

It’s vicious. It’s delivered with total warmth. That combination — the warmth as the delivery mechanism for the verdict — is the whole Southern trick, and it works because it lets everyone in the room feel like nice people while being exactly as judgmental as I am. They just found better packaging.

That’s the case for why I reject the idea that judgment itself is the problem. Every culture does this. Every one of them has built a socially acceptable disguise for the exact same activity — grading, ranking, deciding who’s in and who’s out — because the activity itself is universal. Some cultures call it feedback. Some call it discernment. Mine called it “bless your heart.” None of it is an absence of judgment. It’s just judgment with better manners than mine.

I’m a Judgy Bitch

I’ve known this about myself for a long time — since ninth grade, 1989, when a Myers-Briggs assessment gave it a name for the first time. I test as an INTJ. The J stands for Judging. In that framework, it’s not a mood or a bad day. It’s structural. It’s how my mind is built to process the world: gather information, then reach a conclusion. Not “gather information and hold it open indefinitely.” Conclude. Decide. Judge.

I could put on a mask that makes it look like I’m not doing that. Plenty of people do. But the native process underneath doesn’t change. I look at something and I form a conclusion about it. That’s not a flaw I’m managing. It’s not a character defect I’m in recovery from. It’s the shape of my mind, and I’ve stopped apologizing for it.

I am judgmental. I am a judgy bitch. And I don’t think that’s a bad way of thinking.

Things I Will Judge You For

Since we’re being honest: here’s a partial list.

I will judge you for maintaining a pristine, manicured lawn of foreign invasive grass instead of using that same square footage to grow food — something that actually feeds the soil, feeds a body, and puts something healthy back into the environment instead of a chemical-dependent monoculture that does nothing but look tidy. Yes, I know HOAs are often the reason. Push back on the HOA. If more people prioritized function over appearance, we would not be nearly as deep into the climate mess we’re in.

I will judge you for saying “mis-CHEE-vee-us” instead of “MIS-chi-vus” (there is no fourth syllable in mischievous — it does not exist, you invented it), because you sound like an idiot.

And I will judge you for insisting that Sprouts or Whole Foods is “actually cheaper” than Target or Walmart’s store brand. It isn’t. What you’re actually saying is that you’re too bougie to buy the store brand, and you’ve lied to yourself about the math to avoid admitting it. That self-delusion is the part I’m judging — not the shopping preference.

I will judge you for dropping a random apostrophe into a year or a last name ending in “s” when all you’re trying to do is make it plural. Years are never possessive. There is no situation — none — where a possessive year is correct. The 1990s do not own anything. Neither do the Harrises, the Joneses, or whoever else you’re trying to talk about in the plural. An apostrophe means either possession or a missing letter. Pluralizing an “s” name or a decade is neither. Put it down.

And I will judge you, hard, for citing “that’s the law” or “that’s the rule” or “we’ve always done it this way” as the entire argument and stopping there. Laws and rules are not neutral, and plenty of them were built to encode exactly the discrimination or injustice you’re being asked to examine. Hiding behind the rule instead of engaging with what the rule actually does is not a principled stance. It’s a refusal to think, dressed up as one. If your entire justification for an action or an inaction is that it’s the law, full stop, no further thought required, I’m judging you as an absolute jackass — because you had the option to notice and acknowledge the egregious injustices of the system you’re operating inside of, and you chose not to.

The Part I Actually Want You to Sit With

None of that list is a character indictment. It’s just me, doing what my mind does natively, out loud, without the sugar-coating. I could deliver every one of those the way Clairee would — warm, smiling, plausible deniability fully intact. I’ve simply decided I’d rather skip the packaging.

So if you cringed reading any of it, ask yourself what you actually flinched at. Was it the conclusion, or was it the fact that I said it plainly instead of finding a gentler word to hide it in? Because you scored something today. You ranked a restaurant, rated a coworker’s presentation in your head, decided a friend’s decision was a mistake. You judged. All day. Constantly. The only question is whether you’re going to own the word for it, or keep calling yourself easygoing while doing nothing but.

I am a judgy bitch. I’d rather be honest about what my mind is doing than pretend it’s doing something gentler.

Posted in Everyday Musings

A Cat Named Richard aka the Lump in the Bed

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

How We Found Each Other

In late October 2021, I lost Shadow suddenly to cardiac arrest. For the first time in fifteen years, I had no cat in my house at all. I didn’t know how long I’d need before I was ready to look again — it turned out to be about a week.

I logged onto the Orange County Animal Shelter’s website, where they post photos of the cats available. I was specifically looking for an adult — didn’t need to be a senior, just not another kitten. My first three cats, Miles, Angel, and Shadow, had all come to me as brand-new babies, and after having Shadow as a solo cat for so long, with a rhythm I’d come to love, I was only thinking about bringing home one more.

That’s when I saw him: a cat named Richard. Of all the names you could give a cat, Richard stood out. I had no real commitment to adopting that day — I just thought, why not go meet him?

So my niece and I drove over. When I told the shelter staff I’d come to meet Richard, they seemed surprised and a little excited, though I didn’t understand why yet. In the meet-and-greet room, I noticed — just barely, in the back of my mind — that there were two cats in the little holding cage.

They brought out Richard first. He was standoffish. Not scared, not aggressive — just reserved. Behind him in the cage, I could see another cat pacing, watching, active.

As we were getting ready to put Richard back, I asked some questions, and the man helping us said: “This is Zoe. Richard’s part of a bonded pair. So far we only have applications on Richard — we hold bonded pairs for forty-eight hours to see if anyone wants both.”

I’d never heard the term bonded pair before. He explained: cats who become so emotionally attached that separating them changes their behavior — they can act out, decline quickly, even get sick and die from the separation of the bond.

That sounded significant. So I said, let’s meet Zoe. If Zoe and I click too, then it’s fine.

Zoe came out and was an instant love bug — she’d never met a stranger, hugging on me the way Shadow used to. I thought, no big deal, I’ll take them both. Because I was willing, I brought them both home that same day.

While I was still at the shelter, I learned something else. Richard had been at that shelter once before, as a kitten, and they still had his old intake record — including a birthday: October 31st. My birthday. They don’t do rigorous verification on a kitten’s exact birth date, but it was close enough.

Zoe didn’t have an original record like his, so nobody knew her real birthday. But since they’d always been brought in together, and had been surrendered a week before October 31st, the shelter had simply given her the same date on her paperwork. Another October 31st.

The story behind why they’d come back to the shelter as adults was simple and sad: their owner had died. Neighbors across the street took the cats in temporarily while the family came to settle things, and when no one in the family wanted them, the neighbors surrendered them.

Between the name, the bonded pair, and two cats who — one way or another — shared my birthday, it felt like too many signs to ignore. It was just easy.

The shelter adopted both of them out to me for the price of one, sent us home with food and toys, and I loaded two very unhappy, crying cats into carriers for the thirty-to-forty-five-minute drive home. One of them — probably Zoe, who still gets carsick from stress — pooped in the carrier. I filmed the unboxing when we got home, so somewhere I still have that first footage of the two of them, fresh out of their boxes, becoming part of my life.

The First Eighteen Months

Coming home that first day, it was easy to assume the roles: Richard, a giant twenty-pound (slightly overweight, but not really) boy, must be the dominant one. Zoe, a teeny seven or eight pounds and still kittenish enough that I wondered if her age had been overestimated to match his, must be the follower.

Eighteen months in, I understood it was the opposite. Zoe was the one taking care of Richard. Zoe had adopted him.

During that first year and a half, I started paying close attention to Richard’s behavior — even posting some of it on Facebook at the time — because I came to believe it told a story. Not one of active abuse, but of neglect and isolation.

There was a clear line between his daylight self and his nighttime self. During daylight hours, I’d find him in one of three places. If he needed to fully disappear, he went to the bottom shelf of my closet, tucked behind and underneath my hanging shirts where he couldn’t be seen. He wasn’t cowering there — he’d curl up and actually sleep.

When he felt a little braver, he’d wedge himself between the top blanket and the top sheet of my bed. I called him “the lump in the bed.” That became his standing afternoon routine — reliably there between about one and five o’clock. But once it hit five, especially once winter made it dark by then, he’d start to emerge.

His third spot was the bathroom — the darkest room in the house. He wasn’t squeezed behind the toilet or hiding in a cabinet. He’d just lie out in the open, on the rug, in the dark. That one always read to me as isolation rather than simple hiding — like he might once have been shut away somewhere dark and alone.

Zoe never did any of this. She was always visible — on the pillow if she slept on the bed, on top of everything if she slept on the sofa. The only time she ever got under the covers was to snuggle next to me once I’d already covered up myself.

My guess is that Richard had spent real time as a solo cat, and this was how he’d learned to cope with the loneliness.

Learning to Trust

It took about eighteen months for Richard to fully come out of his shell — and the first real sign of him accepting me came around the six-month mark.

It always happened at night, in the dark, while I was asleep — sometime around two or three in the morning, based on the couple of times I woke enough to notice. However I was lying, he’d come and snuggle against my back. He still wasn’t ready to be touched or played with on demand; he wanted to control the interaction. But he chose to be there, against my back, in the dark hours before sunrise, and I loved it.

A few months after that came a rarer, second stage — maybe a couple of times a year, I’d wake up and find him curled against my front instead, right against my torso and arms, close enough that all I had to do was twitch my fingers to start petting him. That was one of my favorite ways to wake up.

Toward the very end, as he got sicker, that spot against my torso became something he asked for as soon as I got into bed each night — sometimes for twenty minutes, sometimes thirty or forty. One of the last nights, he stayed there a long time, wanting those pets.

Around eighteen months in, he also started joining me on the loveseat where I spend my evenings — my dinner spot, my TV spot. He’d jump up onto the open seat beside me and curl up to sleep. He wouldn’t want to be touched, tolerating maybe a couple of pets after he’d settled, but mostly he just wanted to be near me on his own terms. That became part of our routine, and it eventually grew into him actively asking for affection.

That asking evolved over time, too. First it was just sitting and staring at me. Later, a light paw tap on my arm — no claws, just a signal. Eventually it became headbutts, sometimes paired with a gentle reach-and-grab with his claws to pull my arm toward him.

The Butt Pats

Richard loved having his butt patted — that dopamine hit cats get — more than almost anything else, and it always came bundled with another ritual: smelling my feet and legs to check where I’d been.

If I’d been out of the house, the moment I walked back in, he wanted both: sniffing my feet and shoes to see if I’d been “stepping out on him,” while I patted his butt at the same time. If I’d been gone a long stretch, I’d actually sit down on the floor so he could sniff up my whole legs before he was satisfied.

The same combination showed up in two other regular spots. If I was sitting on the toilet, he expected butt pats while he confirmed my scent around my feet and lower legs — sometimes rolling onto my feet afterward and asking for belly rubs. And on the sofa, the same ritual would turn into him wanting to smell my feet, which meant crossing my legs to bring one foot up close enough for him.

In his last couple of weeks, this became one of the ways I checked in on him throughout the day. I’d lightly tap his butt — if he lifted or moved even a little, I’d keep going. If he didn’t respond at all, I took that as a sign of how much discomfort he was in, and I’d switch to just gentle regular pets instead.

Health

Richard came with a couple of ongoing health issues I managed with the vet over the years. He had a persistent yeast infection in one ear — he both loved and hated the cleanings, hating the liquid and the swab, loving the relief once it was over.

One of his canine teeth was compromised, though it never fully infected. It gave him occasionally terrible breath but never once stopped him from crunching his favorite treats.

The Cat Bed

Any time I was pulling clothes out of my closet or dresser to donate — even freshly washed, straight out of the laundry — I’d find Richard curled up in the box. No matter how many times you wash something, it still smells like you, and he wanted to be in it.

Around the same time, I’d left a couple of empty shipping boxes out after ordering something online — Zoe-sized boxes. I’d put a blanket in one and some packing paper in the other, and Zoe claimed one of them as her sleeping spot. It made me wonder if she’d actually like a proper cat bed, so I picked up a five-dollar one at Five Below, figuring it was cheap enough to try and lose nothing if it didn’t work out.

The next thing I knew, Richard was the one in it. A cat who almost never used a clothes box, who preferred sleeping tucked under covers, in a closet, or in the bathroom, had suddenly claimed this small bed I’d bought for Zoe. And then, more often than not, I’d find them both in it together — one of the most adorable things about their bond was how they slept curled up in that little bed side by side.

Since Richard died this week, Zoe hasn’t touched that bed. She hasn’t even gone up on the sofa it sits on — the same sofa where the two of them used to sleep before the bed even existed. It turns out that bed was really his all along, and Zoe was just a guest who dropped in now and then. She’s still got toys scattered through it that Richard never once played with. It’s one more way he surprised me, and one more thing I didn’t expect to learn about him only after he was gone.

Play, Water, and Food

Richard was about three when I adopted him — young enough to still be kittenish, the way Zoe very much was — but he rarely showed it, except every so often when I’d catch him going to town on one of Zoe’s toys. The second a camera came out, though, he’d stop. I have almost no footage of him playing.

The one thing he’d never back down from, even with Zoe around, was rugs. Lift the edge of a rug with a foot or hand, bounce it lightly, and he’d go wild — chasing it, grabbing it, pulling up the edge. We had one long runner rug that, curled up like a tunnel, he’d jet straight into every time.

He loved water in a way that never quite made sense for a cat. Mornings, he’d sometimes climb straight into the shower before I turned it on, and stay there while the water warmed up, as long as the spray didn’t hit him directly. After my shower, he’d get in and lick up the leftover droplets. He’d sit in the kitchen just to listen to the sound of running water while I did dishes — though the moment an actual drop touched him, he was gone. And on Fridays, when I filled the pitcher to water my cat-safe houseplants, he’d come running to watch the water pool on the glass catch-plate underneath and drink it straight from there.

Food was a harder subject by the end, because it was what first told me something was seriously wrong — a day of sudden, repeated vomiting, until he associated eating with getting sick and stopped eating altogether.

But when he was well, he loved seafood without question — salmon, tuna, sushi the moment I opened the container, shrimp most of all (I learned fast to always save him one). He wasn’t especially food-motivated otherwise; that was more Zoe’s department. He did love soft cheeses — American, Havarti, Fontina — in tiny pinched-off bits, and hot dogs, the meat itself rather than the bun Shadow used to beg for.

His Last Three Weeks

There was no warning. On a Tuesday, Richard ate his regular breakfast like any other morning. Then, out of nowhere, he threw up a massive puddle of partially digested food — something I don’t think had ever happened with him before. He went back and ate again. He threw it up again. That was the first signal, and it echoed the exact same first signal my very first cat, Miles, had given me when he first got sick years earlier.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was right before the Fourth of July weekend, when vets and animal hospitals are closed. We couldn’t get seen until the Monday after — almost a week from when the vomiting and the not-eating first started.

We limped through that week however we could. We tried churros for the first time, and for about two days it was the one thing that got food into him without it coming back up — until it just stopped working, and he wouldn’t touch another one. Otherwise, he’d lick the juice off his favorite canned foods but leave the food itself untouched. The one time he actually ate some, he threw it up almost immediately. He’d clearly connected eating with getting sick.

When we finally got in and ran diagnostics, we found a massive tumor in his liver. I’d been through something similar before, with Miles — digestive organ compromise, the surgeries, the supplements, the force-feeding pills, the stress on their small bodies — and Miles never got a lovely long life or a real recovery out of that fight. I wasn’t willing to put Richard through that same road for the same likely outcome. I chose supportive, palliative care instead, and my vet was fully on board with that decision.

We came home with supplements and appetite stimulants, and for a couple of days it seemed a little easier. But he never really got back to eating — maybe a tablespoon of his regular dry food once, otherwise just licking the juice from a can. I tried a whole rotation of new brands and flavors, since even the wet foods he’d loved for years weren’t working anymore. He did get back to peeing normally, but in three full weeks, that poor cat only pooped once.

The liver damage was already so advanced that one of his test readings came back higher than the test was even able to measure. We were past any chance of a material recovery.

Still, he rallied a little in the second and third week — coming out more, asking for pets, snuggling again for a bit. Zoe noticed the rally too, but she read it as things going back to normal. She’d kept her distance the whole time he was actively sick, only snuggling with him at night in bed, sensing that he didn’t want to be touched or bothered. But during the rally, she started trying to go back to him, rubbing against him playfully. He yelled at her. He hissed at her once. That’s when I knew he was done.

I made the decision to keep him with me through that final weekend and take him in on the Monday afternoon, on purpose — I didn’t want work as a distraction, I wanted to be fully present. Maybe that was selfish of me. I’m okay with that. I watched him closely those last couple of days. He’d still come up onto the sofa, but he wouldn’t curl up anymore — it wasn’t a comfortable position for him. He wasn’t asking for pets either, because being touched didn’t feel good anymore. He’d just sit and look at me. And I knew that look was him telling me he was ready. It turned out I had the timing exactly right.

His Last Day

That last morning, we got up when it got light out, and he sat in the front window watching the world start its day — people on their morning walks, cars pulling out for work, the sun coming up, the birds and the bugs. He took his usual nap tucked under the covers. We had some sweet, quiet moments together. At one point, he held my hand.

Richard and Zoe are the first cats I’ve had with no overlap with the ones who came before them — no crossover time with Miles, my first cat, or Angel, my second, or Shadow, my third. So that last day, while he slept, I talked to him more than once. I told him to go find Miles, because Miles had gone through this same thing at almost exactly the same age, and Miles would know what he was feeling. I told him to go find Angel, because Angel was so much like Zoe and would want to take care of him, snuggle him, make him feel loved. And I told him to go find Shadow, because Shadow loved being outside in a way Richard never got the chance to safely enjoy, and Shadow would teach him to climb trees.

As the sedative started to take him under, I told him once more: go find Miles. And after the doctor confirmed there was nothing left, in the quiet of that room, I said it to him one final time. I know it was just a reflex, nothing more, but it felt like Richard gasped. I needed him to have that instruction, that connection, so that when he crossed over, there’d be somebody already there waiting for him.

When I got home that night, I put the shirt I’d been wearing that day on the bed, not knowing what Zoe would need. I left his pillowcase and bedding out too, keeping his smell close by for Zoe. She hasn’t seemed troubled by any of it. I think, somehow, she already knew.

Coming Home

Every pet I’ve had before Richard went to communal cremation when they died — I got back a small nose print and paw print stamp, shared with other animals, and that was enough. This time was different.

While we were in the vet’s special room for passings, Richard walked over to a shelf where there were end of life brochures and different urns and boxes. I held them up, one at a time, and Richard looked right at them — and at me — and very clearly signaled the one he wanted by reaching out with a paw and pulling it to him. So this time, I chose individual cremation, with a plaster paw print made just for him.

I picked him up this past Friday, July 24th. He’s home now, urn and paw print both, with me and Zoe. I’ll figure out how I want to display him, and I’ll add a photo here once I do — but for now, he’s just home.

Posted in Cultural Commentary

The Shape of This Thing: Workshopping the Trump Second Term Nickname

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

The Nickname Always Comes

Every presidency gets a nickname. It’s how history takes notes. And we are absolutely, already, in the middle of writing this one — even if we won’t admit that’s what we’re doing.

The New Deal. The Great Society. The War on Terror. Even the ones we’d rather forget get compressed into something portable — a phrase that does the work of a thousand policy papers in a single breath. The nickname isn’t assigned. It emerges. It’s the thing that survives when the news cycle finally exhausts itself and what’s left is just the shape of what happened. ([1], [2])

This One Is Different

Donald Trump’s second term — non-consecutive, which is its own historical oddity, the first since Grover Cleveland — presents a particular challenge to that process. Because you can’t entirely separate the second term from the first, and yet they aren’t the same thing either. The first term felt like an experiment. The second feels like a conclusion. And the nickname, whenever it solidifies, will have to account for both the man who showed us what he was and the country that, knowing exactly what he was, said yes again.

This one has a different problem. The shape keeps changing. Or rather — there are too many shapes, and they’re all accurate, and none of them are quite enough.

The Metaphors I Tried First

I started with the Homecoming King President. It’s the kind of framing that lands differently if you’re a Gen X woman — if you were there, watching from the bleachers, already fluent in the language of unearned social power. The performative popularity contest, the sash, the way the title confers status without requiring competence. For those of us who watched the football captain and the head cheerleader crowned on a gymnasium floor while the rest of us observed, the metaphor felt viscerally right. Social dominance dressed up as celebration. Power that was never really earned, just… confirmed.

But it didn’t hold. Partly because homecoming court has actually changed — younger generations have genuinely disrupted who gets crowned, and increasingly it’s queer kids, kids with disabilities, kids who would have been invisible in our era. The institution got reclaimed, at least partially. Using it as a stand-in for retrograde power feels like it insults the reclamation. And partly because the metaphor lives in the past. It explains where this came from. It doesn’t capture what it’s doing.

The Fraternity President came closer. White fraternities — and the whiteness matters here, because it’s doing specific work that Black fraternities, with their entirely different histories and purposes, are not — spent the 1990s hemorrhaging legitimacy through hazing scandals that exposed what the culture actually required to sustain itself. Conformity enforced through humiliation. Hierarchy maintained through ritual degradation. Brotherhood that was always conditional on your willingness to absorb harm and call it tradition. Sound familiar.

And they’ve been declining ever since. Chapters closing. Membership shrinking. Younger generations simply refusing to accept that this is who runs campus culture anymore. The Fraternity President metaphor works because it’s not just a description — it’s a trajectory. It captures the last gasp quality of this moment. The guy holding the paddle insisting this is still how things work, while the quad empties out around him.

But even that isn’t quite big enough. Because the quad isn’t just American anymore.

The Abdication

The nickname that keeps pulling at me is something in the register of The Abdication. Not because it’s the one that will stick — I’m not sure it’s culturally sticky enough — but because it names what the rest of the world is actually experiencing. The word has history. When Edward VIII abdicated the British throne in 1936, it was a single act by a single man that rewrote the trajectory of the monarchy, the country, and arguably the course of World War II — because the man who stepped into the void, George VI, was a different kind of leader entirely, and the alliances that held or fractured in those years turned on questions of character and commitment at the top. One abdication. Seismic consequences. The ripples are still visible if you know where to look.

The parallel isn’t perfect — it never is. But there’s something in the structure of it that fits. A voluntary relinquishment of responsibility dressed up as something else. In Edward’s case, love. In this case, grievance, nationalism, and the transactional worldview of someone who has never encountered a relationship he didn’t believe could be reduced to a deal. NATO allies quietly recalibrating. Long-standing trade relationships treated like inconveniences. Decades of diplomatic architecture dismantled with the energy of someone clearing out a storage unit. Other countries aren’t just watching America change. They’re building around American unreliability the way you’d build around a neighbor who stopped maintaining their property. You don’t wait for them to fix it. You put up your own fence.

The Other Side of the Workshop

There’s a version of this that his supporters would call long overdue. America finally stopped subsidizing the world’s problems. Stopped playing global hall monitor. Started putting its own interests first. The nickname from that vantage point might be something like The Correction. The Restoration. The Return. Something that frames this presidency not as destruction but as recalibration — a rebalancing of a system that had drifted so far from its original constituency that a wrecking ball wasn’t just inevitable, it was necessary. Those nicknames are being workshopped too, in different corners of the internet, with equal conviction and, it should be said, with genuine grievance underneath them. The people who feel that way aren’t wrong that something had stopped working for them. They’re just wrong about what broke it, and who broke it, and who’s going to pay for fixing it.

The Naming Problem

Which brings me to the naming problem that keeps me up at night more than any of the others.

MAGA will almost certainly make it into the final characterization. The movement is too dominant, too self-branded, too deliberately constructed for posterity to be left out of the historical shorthand entirely. But I hope — and I mean this as something more than preference — that it doesn’t end up inside the nickname itself. Because MAGA is a self-constructed brand, built for exactly this purpose: to colonize the historical record on its own terms, to be the thing that gets written in the margin forty years from now. If the nickname the culture lands on includes MAGA, the movement wins a kind of posterity it hasn’t earned. It gets to name itself. And that is not a neutral act.

And MAGA didn’t arrive alone. It arrived with a blueprint. Project 2025 — the 900-page governing document produced by the Heritage Foundation before a single vote was cast in 2024 — is the thing that separates this presidency from every chaotic, norm-busting moment that preceded it. Trump spent much of the campaign distancing himself from it, which is its own telling detail. But the fingerprints are everywhere: in the dismantling of federal agencies, in the restructuring of the civil service, in the systematic removal of institutional friction that used to slow the exercise of unchecked executive power. MAGA is the feeling. Project 2025 is the architecture. The nickname that history assigns to this era will have to reckon with the fact that what happened wasn’t improvised. It was written down. In advance. With footnotes.

What It Says About Us

The nickname that sticks will be the one that holds both registers at once — the absurdity and the damage, the spectacle and the harm. The one that makes people in 2040 immediately picture something. Not a policy. Not a party. A feeling. The specific feeling of watching something load-bearing get removed from a structure everyone was living inside, and realizing — too late or just in time, depending on where you stood — that nobody was going to put it back.

We – the public – are workshopping that nickname right now in real time. This piece is proof. And what that says about us — that we’re already reaching for the historical shorthand while the history is still happening — might be the most honest thing any of us have written about this moment.

Presidential Nicknames To Date

You can check out previous presidential era nicknames at these sources:

Wikipedia — List of Nicknames of Presidents of the United States — comprehensive, covers every president with sourced context for how each nickname originated

Fiveable — Presidential Nicknames to Know — more analytical; connects nicknames to their historical context and what each reveals about the era, not just the man

A two-column reading list graphic titled "Better Graduation Books than Oh, the Places You'll Go." The left column, labeled "High School," lists The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, Range by David Epstein, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, and Bossypants by Tina Fey. The right column, labeled "College," lists So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport, The Defining Decade by Meg Jay, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, and Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. A row of illustrated book spines runs along the bottom, with one red spine marked with an X. The tagline reads: "Books that take the graduate seriously."
Posted in Children

Better Graduation Books Than _Oh, the Places You’ll Go_

Posted on by singingaboutcooking

The Problem with the Seuss Default

Oh, the Places You’ll Go has become the default graduation gift for one simple reason: it feels meaningful without requiring much thought. It’s colorful, familiar, and its message — you’re special, life will be an adventure, you’ll figure it out — is warm and easy to receive. For a gift-giver, it checks every box.

But that’s also exactly the problem. The book is vague by design. It acknowledges that life will be hard (“the Waiting Place,” the slumps) but offers no tools, no framework, no honest reckoning with what hard actually looks like. Its central promise — that the graduate is destined for great places simply by virtue of being themselves — is comforting in the moment and quietly unhelpful afterward. It mistakes encouragement for wisdom.

There’s also a more uncomfortable possibility worth naming: Oh, the Places You’ll Go may resonate less with graduates than with the adults giving it. Its vision of the child as a singular, destined protagonist — launched into the world but still defined by the wonder and innocence of childhood — is deeply comforting to a parent who isn’t quite ready to let go. The book keeps the graduate small in the most loving way possible. It whispers that the world is theirs, while quietly preserving the parent’s role as the one who believed in them first, who shaped who they are, whose hopes and dreams are woven into their future. For a parent grieving the end of a particular kind of closeness — the daily influence, the shared household, the child who still looked to them for answers — Seuss offers a gentle farewell that doesn’t fully acknowledge that the farewell is happening. That’s understandable. But it’s the parent’s emotional need, not the graduate’s. And the graduate deserves a gift chosen for them.

Graduates, whether leaving high school or college, are standing at a threshold that deserves more than a well-meaning shrug. They need books that take their intelligence seriously, that grapple with real questions — about meaning, identity, failure, work, and what a good life actually requires. The books below do that.

For High School Graduates

These books are accessible, relatively short, and speak directly to the experience of being 17 or 18 — full of possibility but uncertain about identity, direction, and what comes next.

1. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho A slim, allegorical fable about a shepherd boy who sets out to find treasure and discovers that the journey itself is the point. It romanticizes purpose without being naive about the cost of pursuing it. Readable in a weekend, resonant for years.

2. Range by David Epstein A research-driven argument that generalists — people who explore widely before specializing — tend to outperform early specialists in the long run. An enormous relief for any 18-year-old who doesn’t know what they want to do with their life yet. Spoiler: that’s a feature, not a bug.

3. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott Ostensibly a book about writing, but really a book about showing up to hard things in small, manageable pieces. Her concept of “shitty first drafts” applies to college essays, careers, relationships — essentially everything. Funny, honest, and deeply practical.

4. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch A Carnegie Mellon professor, given a terminal cancer diagnosis, delivers one final lecture about achieving childhood dreams and enabling others to do the same. Warm, specific, and full of concrete life lessons. Reads in an afternoon and lands hard.

5. Bossypants by Tina Fey (especially for young women) Part memoir, part comedy masterclass, entirely honest about ambition, imposter syndrome, and navigating institutions that weren’t built for you. Makes the case — through laughter — that confidence is built, not born.

For College Graduates

These books assume a bit more life experience and engage with harder questions: career, meaning, mortality, and what it actually takes to build something worth building.

1. So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport A direct challenge to “follow your passion” — arguably the most damaging advice given to young people. Newport argues, with evidence, that passion follows mastery, not the other way around. Essential reading for anyone anxious about finding their “calling.”

2. The Defining Decade by Meg Jay A clinical psychologist makes a calm, compelling case that your 20s are not a throwaway decade — that the choices made between 22 and 32 have an outsized impact on the rest of life. Not alarmist. Genuinely clarifying.

3. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl A psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz writes about how meaning — not happiness — is what allows humans to endure almost anything. Brief, devastating, and one of the most important books of the 20th century. Every graduate should read it before they’re 25.

4. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi A neurosurgeon facing terminal lung cancer writes about what makes a life worth living. It asks the questions that a diploma doesn’t answer: What do I value? What do I owe others? What will I leave? Beautifully written and impossible to put down.

5. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight Nike’s origin story, told as a raw, unglamorous memoir. Knight was broke, uncertain, and frequently on the verge of collapse for over a decade. More than any business book, it captures what building something actually feels like — and why it’s worth it anyway.

Any of these will outlast the Seuss book on a shelf — and more importantly, in the mind of the person who reads it.