Hey there. So, this armchair contact tracer (I did take and pass the Johns Hopkins U. Covid-19 Contact Tracing Course with a 97% — still pissed about that one question), is going to go on record with this: please reconsider that vacation with people who don’t live with you. Particularly…

Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional. I’m just a regular New Yorker who has been in quarantine for 115 days. These are my observations. People who live in places where your numbers are going up…here’s what’s about to happen: suddenly people from all parts of your life will experience…

Dear rest of the world, Yes, many of the citizens of the United States are mortified — truly embarrassed — that Trump is our President. We did not vote him into office the way most democracies do: via popular vote. We have a really silly system that was intended to make sure that the smaller states “had a voice”, but has been corrupted by one party to draw areas that look like absurd jigsaw puzzle pieces so that they can win specific states and they can sway the system.

A few years ago, a friend who I met when she was a foreign-exchange student from Finland came to visit, just after the new year. …

I had a thought this morning. I posted a couple of weeks ago that I’d successfully sung the worst karaoke song ever for my favorite karaoke bartender, who has heard them all. The song was “You And Me Against The World”, which was an AM radio hit by Helen Reddy…

This morning I awoke to an email about the passing of my childhood next-door neighbor. We shared a first and middle name, although she spelled hers in the “normal” way, which made me envious as a child. At the time, I didn’t want to be even more different. Her dad…

I once knew a woman who was one of the funniest and liveliest women I ever met. Before we had to show our IDs at every office building and go through metal detectors, and our mail was scanned in big office buildings, she worked in the original World Trade Center…

Last hour in childhood home. Odd. It’s a wreck. Boxes everywhere. Nothing as it was, but odder to know that soon it won’t belong to us. We specified it. It was in a new development. You picked your lot and the model, and then the colors, and any add-ons. …

I grew up in San Jose, California. We moved there when I was about six months old. My dad could smell Viet Nam heating up, because he’d flown a few missions there through the Air Force. (Side note: one of the only things he ever said about overt racism in…