Are you getting everything you can out of this life?
A self-less, feel-good blog about love, life, and work by career coach and existential adventurer, Cliff Flamer
I sat up late drinking a single-malt, then champagne, then single-malt again, thinking about my mom who we just wheeled into an assisted living facility.
She has dementia, or Alzheimer’s. I don’t know the difference, but whatever it is, it’s taken her.
So I spent … Read more...
The most difficult form of parenting to deal with as a child is when the caregiver is inconsistent in their behavior.
Psychologists say this leads to a ‘disorganized attachment style’ for the child. In other words, the child is unable to predict the behavior that’… Read more...
LGBTQIA is a mouthful. It takes a while to say it. It’s a commitment to go all the way through it in a conversation
And when I do (which is always), I’m not doing it to be righteous or to prove my wokeness. I’m not doing it to push my agenda or be seen as a certa… Read more...
I remember the first time I got in trouble at school. It was in the cafeteria. Grade school. We sat at those massively long tables, 8 rows of ’em, with the teachers patrolling the edges like border collies.
I’m not sure how it started but Matty P, my best friend in the… Read more...
“I appreciate you.”
I hear it all the time now, a new closing statement, presumably evolved from the more impersonal “I appreciate it,” or “Much appreciated.”
Hooray! We’ve replaced the “it” and the understood “you” … Read more...
I normally go right onto the freeway after I drop off Hazy, but I decided to go left today, which is the direction I used to go to drop Evs off at high school; the same road I took to drop Ziggy off at the groomers.
Maybe it was because I was digging the radio guy’s Irish ac… Read more...
The radio people love to ask provocative questions.
This time, they asked if people could go back to college, would they? And what would they do differently?
The answers generally fell into 2 categories:
1) Party more.
2) Party less.
So, what about me? Would I go back?
My immediate th… Read more...
When I was young and complaining about having nothing to do, my mom would tell me, “Hush up. Your Great Gramma Lena started bowling in her 80s.”
My youthful brain would think to myself: “What’s that got to do with anything?”
My mom, as if hearing my th… Read more...
It was feminists who had the courage to diagnose the world around them, to take the glaring light that was shining on them and turn it around to blind their accusers.
“We are not the problem,” they said, tired of being labeled anxious, depressed, hysterical. “We … Read more...
One of my best friends from high school once pointed out how I like to think about my thoughts.
He’s right. I like to think about my memories too. And in both cases, I often misinterpret and misremember. I’m often wrong.
But, as it turns out, that’s not a bad thin… Read more...