In one of my first memories, I’m running. I’m running so fast on such short legs strapped into Velcro sneakers that I feel like I might somehow propel myself upwards, into the air. I’m running across a floor, a basketball court, and my parents are both somewhere nearby, but the hardwood expanse surrounds me, and all the noises I hear, construction noises, people talking and moving around, are muted in the distance. I look up and into a 360-degree panorama of thousands of empty seats when I stop to catch my breath. When I look higher, up at the ceiling…

Now that Carmichael has been home for about two weeks and has mostly acclimated to his surroundings, I decided to uproot all of that by taking him to the vet for his first check-up. In advance of this short trip (there are somehow three vets within a half-mile radius of my apartment), I made a list of questions to ask the vet, which is how I learned exactly how much of my anxiety I have been transferring into the care and keeping of my new cat. I will let you read the questions and judge me accordingly. …

This week my family grew by one: On Tuesday morning Kate picked me up in Tyler’s car and drove me down to Flatbush for one very important task: To pick up Carmichael, the cat I have been adopting, from his foster. I grew up with cats but it took me seven years of living in New York to acquire one for myself. This is because every roommate I’ve had in New York has been staunchly anti-cat or had their own that I inevitably doted on instead. …

Since I made my family’s seafoam salad for Thanksgiving and wrote about it last year, I’ve been thinking about other Kosoff family recipes I could make my own in some way. My late paternal grandmother, Janet Haines Kosoff, was not the proprietor of seafoam salad — it traveled from the midwest all the way to the suburbs of Syracuse, New York, by way of her husband’s family — but it was in upstate New York where she prepared it for her husband and her three sons, immortalizing the recipe on a card that made its way to Hershey, Pennsylvania, and…

To get out of bed on Mondays is already a Sisyphean task. Last year I created a series of arbitrary rules to adhere to during quarantine just to give myself purpose — for several months I decided I’d eat the same jammy eggs and leftover roasted vegetables from dinner with wilted greens for breakfast, drinking is for weekends only, Friday afternoon after my meetings are over I can work from bed — to try to create some sense of order, or else I would simply never leave bed or get anything done.

I grudgingly followed my own rules a good…

This week a couple different things happened: the CDC shifted its stance on wearing masks (fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear them in most situations) and the dreary cold spring weather New York has been having finally broke, resulting in a streak of actually sunny 70-degree days. With the caveat that there is still very much a pandemic happening, it feels like…normal spring again? I can’t believe it either. …

Last week I moved into a new apartment. Moving is a horrible task, and even though I tried to do a bunch of things that would ostensibly make my life easier during the move — renting those reusable plastic bins instead of getting moving boxes; calling around to find the mover who would give me the best quote; arranging several furniture deliveries so that things would arrive at my apartment the day I got here — life, as they say, had other plans for me. My moving bin company ghosted me. My movers lectured me on the stripped screws holding…

The last time I wrote about personal finance, it was mostly a cautionary tale. I told you exactly how bad with money I’ve been, and in an attempt to rectify that, I went on my own personal cancel culture crusade. That’s right: I cancelled a bunch of automatically renewing subscriptions I had no business continuing to pay for. Gone were my Wall Street Journal and Hulu subscriptions. I went in person to the Union Square Planet Fitness to cancel a lingering gym membership from 2015. …