Writing Through the Fog

Imagine that you die with computer passwords in your head, leaving coworkers without access to critical files. Imagine your loved ones cannot find your bank accounts, or that you die with a secret that you longed to reveal during your lifetime. This copy is pulled from the home page of Deathswitch, which I found through [...]

Audio for part one of this post. I wrote an outline of my parallel universes at the start of this year. The beginning: 1. My mother and father, both born in the Philippines, move to the United States and meet one another, or 2. My mother (or father) moves to the United States, but my father [...]

(Intended Title: Fleeting Love in the Time of Ambiguous Cinema, Part III) Audio for part I of this post. The first time I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, years ago, I didn’t like it. The film—about two people who go through a procedure to erase each other from their memories—was made well, and [...]

Facebook makes us jealous. Competitive. Depressed. Facebook stirs up that fear of missing out. Facebook’s meaningless, frictionless sharing—think automatic Spotify updates—makes us care less. Facebook is destroying our friendships. Our connections. What it means to truly interact and be social. And so on. You’ve heard this all before. There are many of these articles floating [...]

Yesterday, someone on Twitter posed a question: What makes you unfollow people? So, I compiled the top 10 types of tweets and peeps that make me click “Unfollow.” And I follow less than 100 handles, so believe me, I’m fickle with the clicking. The meaningless Follow Friday tweet. Occasionally, I send out an FF tweet on Fridays [...]

Audio for this post. When I was four years old, my best friend Malia lived two blocks away; I rode my bike to her house, and we sped off to explore our neighborhood. In high school, all of my friends lived within a fifteen-mile radius; we coordinated hangouts over the phone, we sent beeper messages [...]

Above: @AJEnglish tweets mixed with top, promoted, and other tweets from my stream. Please refrain from laughing at my rudimentary Photoshop skills. Yesterday, I had multiple CoTweet and HootSuite dashboards open on numerous browsers,  scanning the streams of 40+ Twitter accounts at once. I was the operator of the Nebuchadnezzar, sifting through the code. On my primary and [...]

Irritated, I sighed and glanced at my mother. I had shared my latest post on social media, Egypt, and (my) pseudo-activism on Facebook. And no one had commented. I sifted through my Facebook feed. Ah, yes! Somebody just checked in at the dry cleaners. A handful of “likes” earned, naturally. And oh, look! Someone ate a ham [...]