For a long time I have told people, with an amount of frustration, that I liked bird-watching before it was cool to like bird-watching. This isn’t actually true, as it has always been kind of cool to like bird-watching. Basically, all the cool guys of history have liked it.

Aristotle was super into bird-watching. He was also arrogant (as many of the great thinkers throughout time have been and still are), so he made sweeping false statements about birds. He saw birds disappear in the winter and, even though many early scientists were already onto migration, he told everyone that…

Let’s start with a piece of information that I hope you know already, but that you may not: cookies are the easiest thing to bake.

There are baking people out there who might argue with me, but what they are really trying to say to you is that it is hard to bake a GREAT batch of cookies, and that may be true. What is not hard is baking a perfectly fine batch of cookies that would all get eaten at an IRL party, and will all get eaten by you and your roommates within the next two days.

I’m…

A close friend recently texted me that they felt “ashamed” because they “wanted to get more attention” for telling a story about their life.

A few years ago, I was feeling lost. “Stuck in the weeds” was how I kept referring to my state of existence. A little voice in my head kept telling me, incessantly, “You can’t do anything.” It literally said those words!

One day, I woke up feeling tired of the voice. So I decided to slap back. “Surely I can do some things!” I said out loud. (A word of advice: It’s best to argue with the mean voices in your head in the privacy of your own home.)

I decided to make this a project: I would write about…

This story begins with me uniquely ready to start the day.

I sat on the big, red reading chair in my study, listening to some kind of woozy chime music that people play in meditation studios, blissfully journaling at 7 a.m. Friends, I’d already exercised. I had a god damned green smoothie in my left hand, for heaven’s sake. The Sophie of this day was knocking the whole “morning routine” thing out of the park.

And then I heard my husband’s loud, loud punk music blaring from the kitchen. The kitchen! Four rooms away!

He had no regard for my…

So you’re dating a bird. Now what?

This Valentine’s Day, I’ve got you covered. Choose one of these avian-specific printable cards, put it in their beak, and bask in the glow of really understanding your feathered loved one.

(In case some of these don’t make sense, I’ve written a corresponding true bird fact beneath each valentine. Now you can learn about birds while winning their hearts! You’re welcome.)

Crows are incredibly intelligent, and have been known to fashion tools out of leaves or bendable sticks or wires in order to grab or capture things from the bottom of wells that…

Here’s a familiar image in my life story: I am lying bed, cradling a bowl of microwave nachos, laptop perched on my knees, half-watching “Gilmore Girls” season two for the twelve-thousandth time, passively weeping.

Two weeks before this scene takes place, I’m all fired up with the many exciting things I have to do, and urgency is center stage. There are writing deadlines and drawing projects and there are lessons to plan for my teaching job and there is the actual teaching. (Urgent because money, because rent, because capitalism, because survival.) I’ve volunteered for some activism work, which never seems…