For several years I have volunteered for an organization that partners with internationals attending our local university. By picking them up from the airport, helping them buy winter coats, hosting a weekly community dinner, and connecting them to neighborhood resources, the goal is to ensure that international students and their families are made to feel welcomed and loved.

Welcoming and loving foreigners is a distant concept to much of America today. Americans voted in 2016 based on “cultural anxiety.” Attacks against people of color in the form of white supremacist rallies and police shootings have been exposed. A country that prides itself in aligning with “Christian” morality has come to a point where Christians are the least likely to accept responsibility for refugees. Most recently, immigrants have been indefinitely separated from their children, and thousands of undocumented children have been subsequently lost.

Read More on Medium

February 14, 2008, I was at after-school rehearsal for my high school’s spring play when a classmate looked at her phone and exclaimed to us all that there had been a shooting at Northern Illinois University, the college just up the road.

This was before widespread cell phone access among teens, and there certainly were no smart phones. The rest of us without phones had no way of getting in touch with our parents and no way to look up exactly where and when the shooting took place. This was particularly alarming for me because my dad worked for NIU. For all I knew, my dad had been shot.

Read More on Medium

I have been casually making videos on YouTube since 2010. Back then, YouTube was not a career goal, and analytics and algorithms were practically unheard of. People made videos because they enjoyed it. They made videos because it was a creative outlet. They made videos to find a sense of community.

I am still in that place. I don’t make videos consistently enough to earn money or to garner a plethora of views, but that doesn’t matter to me. The friendships I have made through the YouTube community and the things I’ve learned from those friendships are more valuable to me than trends or clickbait or AdSense earnings. It’s difficult for some people to understand, but I make videos because I like to make them, and that’s that.

I recently was confronted about this.

Read More on Medium

I recently started a new job as a retail display coordinator. Having been with my company for five years I assumed people would have a vague understanding of the display branch and, therefore, what I would be doing in my new position. Not so. A few dozen tragic conversations later, I’ve discovered it’s incredibly difficult to grasp.

Read More on Medium