Lifestyle Category

1. It’s really hard, and you enjoy a more casual amount of exercise. Walking from the couch to the fridge, for example. 2. Those weird pull-ups thy do look dumb and probably don’t even work. I bet you can do 30 of them in a row already. Go ahead, try it. 3. Your ego would really take a hit getting put to shame by a ripped and gorgeous Crossfit girl, better not risk it. 4. You don’t want to lift weights and get bulky like a man, you prefer yourRead More

Every holiday season brings something new, and this year brought for me some observations. This being my first holiday season an appetizer contributing adult, I noticed things I had never considered in my many years as nothing more than a young gift receiver.   1. Each day closer to Christmas and New Years everyone’s driving gets worse. Everyone is desperate to finish shopping and beginning to lose their minds from all of the contact with distant relatives.   2. After December 20th, don’t even try surviving the mall. If DecemberRead More

I am obsessed with order, symmetry, perfection. I hate gray areas, in-betweens, grounds of ambiguity. Last year, I strove for an all-or-nothing “balance” that I thought would regulate and organize my life. However, what I’ve realized is that balance is not about “extremes” leveling each other out. It is not always about saying a hard yes or a hard no. It isn’t about making a definite decision. Rather, a true balance is about finding the middle ground that I have hated so much. Last year, in an effort to maintain aRead More

When I started college last year, I averaged about five hours of sleep a night. As the year tolled on, my alarm clock chirped an hour earlier. Four hours of sleep definitely wasn’t something I enjoyed, but it was a routine necessity just like everything else on my to-do list. I enlisted it as another adjustment to becoming an “maturing.” Adulthood meant being career-driven and hungry for success—so naturally, sleep deprived, right? Unfortunately, even only a few months, in the human body realizes that it simply cannot operate with soRead More

I’ve made it back home after a three week solo roadtrip on the west coast – and I am in one piece. My limbs are all still attached, my physical state is intact except for a bike scrape on my ankle. I’ve returned with all my possessions present, minus one lost hair elastic and one tube of lipstick. I would consider my sanity partially stable, and my mental health only mildly shaken. My bank account will need a whole year to recuperate, but I feel exponentially richer than before IRead More

We can’t stop, and we won’t stop—Well, you should stop. New Year resolutions are great—if you’re the type of person who is so self-disciplined that you can actually follow through with your promises for longer than one week—aka, you’re probably not human. So, as imperfect humans, we are typically more prone to listen when we are told no, don’t, STOP. The negative is always more powerful, and I’m going to put that to the test.   15 Stop-It’s for 2014 Stop spending more on material goods than on experiences. It’s greatRead More

It’s time to stop kidding ourselves.   Resolution #1: Lose weight Actual outcome: Go to the gym a couple times a week but still eat like shit and drink like a frat boy on the weekends, resulting in maybe a pound lost and regained over the course of a month. Rinse, repeat.   Resolution #2: Cook for myself and stop eating pasta and salad every night like a scrub Actual outcome: Maybe cook quinoa or lentils every once in a while. Continue to buy the Publix pre-made roasted chicken.   Resolution #3: Keep a budgetRead More

Making resolutions for the new year is easy: lose weight, read more, eat healthy, blah, blah, blah. Unfortunately, these life changing commitments are typically abandoned well before the second month of the year. Instead of setting yourself up for failure with vague resolutions and no plan of action, this can be the year that you actually follow through.   Instead of “lose weight” 1. Don’t drink during the week. Alcohol isn’t doing us any favors when it comes to our health. For most people, it’s pretty unrealistic to cut out alcoholRead More

I used to think that the term “young adult” referred to Twilight novels only, but I am tired of repeatedly crediting my generation as “twenty-somethings,” so here we are. New Year’s resolutions are either a popular or vexatious topic, depending on the seriousness of the declarations and the audience’s own commitment to growth and change, but there is hardly a young adult who doesn’t use social media in some form or another. In this Near Year if you make any resolutions, I hope you dance, yes, but also that your resolutionsRead More

There’s something about engaging in a (slightly) revolting activity in the presence of an attractive individual that is not preferable. By presence, I specifically mean sitting one inch away from a nice-looking Canadian man on an airplane, and by revolting I mean unwrapping a half-devoured, room-temperature burrito in your lap from a mock “Chipotle” in the Dallas airport and spilling black beans on your shared armrest. Excuse me, sir, care for a luke-warm lentil?  I had four more hours of traveling next to my burrito and this Canadian man andRead More

When you’re on a date with someone and there’s a lull in the conversation, sometimes that lull grows into a black hole of silence that there is no returning from. And the more you realize it’s growing, the more you panic, the deeper you sink into the quicksand of quiet. So before it gets to the eerie point of a borderline monastic silence, you should enlist the Art of So. The Art of So is centered on the theory that people love to talk about themselves. This is usually theRead More

You know how sometimes you get text messages from friends that just kind of irritate you? Maybe it’s a hostile “K” or a passive aggressive “:)” or maybe it’s just a “hahah.” And you think, “Hahaha?” That’s not a response. Those aren’t words. Those are sounds. You sent me sounds. How am I supposed to respond to that? Right, so texting has become this enigma of conversation where we laugh, but aren’t actually laughing and send smiles when no smiles are actually occurring and that’s all fine and well becauseRead More

The holiday season is here, and, for many of us, that means going home to the places and the people that have been watching us grow up. Returning home means running into everyone I never wanted to see again at one of the five bars in my hometown and having to relearn how to drive a car after months of walking and taking the subway. It means getting to eat my mom’s bombass breakfasts and snuggle with my cat whenever he lets me. It means spending every second with myRead More

All men everywhere, I am certain, have wondered at least once what their underwear choice says about them. And let’s not disregard the neurotic women of the Millennial generation that Google-search this exact title moments after Paul, or Greg, or Jeff with the butt-chin has left her sexed sheets on a Sunday morning. Mark Twain insists that one should “write what you know.” After years of observations, demonstrations, and ruminations of friends, landlords, brothers, and a significant others of the straight and semi-straight variety and their chonies I feel confidentRead More

I used to go on Yelp to help me decide where to go to eat or get takeout. I don’t really do that anymore. Why? Because despite the assertion that Yelp exists ostensibly for this purpose, I’ve found that it skews largely negative, at least where I live. I suppose this makes sense in some way. People are more likely to be moved to write a review of a restaurant if they’ve had a bad experience there. (People fucking LOVE bitching about stuff.) Otherwise they’re too busy stuffing their facesRead More