I Am Not A “We”: Am I Just Half... the marco lauren entity

I used to feel sad for couples who compartmentalize their social lives by keeping their partners away from their friends. To me, a healthy relationship is one that includes lots and lots of shared experiences with friends, both pre-relationship buds and the mutual friends you make throughout the years. Marco genuinely enjoys the company of

How to be Happy (When You’re Cynical as Hell) how to be happy

Happiness is not a thing that comes naturally to me. I’m constantly anxious about one thing and cranky about the other. When something good happens, I tend to approach it with suspicion, in case it turns out to be some sort of joke God or the universe is playing at my expense. I half-expect a

Embracing Pointlessness on New Year’s Day brotherhood of dada

On New Year’s day, nearly an hour after midnight, Marco greeted me a happy new year and asked me how I was. “The same as Christmas and the day before that,” I replied, which meant to say I wasn’t feeling that great. I had been suffering from a major case of the new year blues,

So Long, Space Cat Kylee (1999 – 2012) kylee

When pets have been with you for years, it’s easy to believe that they’ll be by your side forever. But even the most stalwart space cats can’t fight old age and pneumonia, as I learned yesterday afternoon when I came home to find my beloved Kylee dead. I was 12 going on 13 when I

Thinking Of My Brother On His 19th Birthday sixth-birthday-cake

Today is my brother Luijoe’s 19th birthday. Or it would have been, if he lived to see today. Believe it or not, it still hurts to think about him after 11 (12?) years of him being gone. No matter where I go or what I do, he’s always in the back of my mind, as

Exercise writing

If writing is a muscle that needs exercise, then my writing muscle is a lazy flabby thing growing fat on a junk food diet of comedy websites and British tabloids. It occasionally gets up with a grunt to churn out reports, emails, and training documents before slumping back into a sofa, cushions deflating under its

A Conversational One Night Stand one night stand

A few nights ago, I had my first one night stand since college. Most people understand a “one night stand” to be a single night of casual, no-strings attached sex, but there’s a second definition for the term, one that I invented and never really thought to share with anyone until now. Have you ever

Protected: I’m Too Happy to Write (and it’s making...

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Lessons Learned After 13 Years of Personal Blogging

Today, my mom reminded me that it’s been thirteen years since I started my blog on Angelfire. I was ten then and I am twenty-three now, and while blog may have changed URLs and platforms over the years, I never really stopped putting my life on the Internet for all sorts of normal and creepy