Author: Andrew Goodrick
-
Groupthink
Every night I read stories to our three children. My oldest loves the Five Nights at Freddy’s universe and has me reading the graphic novels. It’s an odd place to find lessons for life, but sometimes they come from unexpected sources. In one of the stories, a character slowly dying from blood loss loses consciousness…
-
Low Bar – But I’ll take it
My first reaction to today’s prompt is “5,000 steps? That’s it? Setting the bar kind of low, aren’t we?” And besides, what kind of prompt is this? How does posting “I did it, I did the bare minimum of a lightly active day” produce anything worth reading? There’s a bit of truth in all that.…
-
The Leak Isn’t Where the Stain Is
There’s a thing that happens on almost every leak call. The homeowner meets me at the door and walks me straight to the stain — usually a brown ring on a ceiling, sometimes a bubble in the paint — and tells me the leak is right there. Points at it. And most of the time…
-
You Are What You Eat
People ask some version of this every so often — what book or movie or song changed how you see the world — and I never have a good answer, which used to nag at me. I’d go looking for one. There had to be one in there somewhere. Some record I heard at sixteen…
-
Family Ties
I’m sure this varies family by family in the United States, but we seem so isolated here. Maybe it’s because it’s such a big country and people tend to move away when they grow up, or maybe it’s our individualism and desire to break away and “be our own person” but we don’t seem to…
-
PSA: Clean Under Your Bidet
This may be kind of a weird subject for WordPress, but I’ve got to get it out there because it took me a while to figure it out. If you’ve got a bidet attachment — one of the budget clip-on ones especially — and your bathroom has a faint smell you can’t track down no…
-
There Are No Spare Parts
“How do you handle fear and self-doubt?” The word that gets me is handle — like they’re clutter to sweep out of the house. I don’t buy it anymore. Fear and self-doubt were put in us on purpose. They aren’t flaws in the design. They’re part of it. Fear keeps you alive. It makes you…
-
Meow
Cats. But honestly I don’t want to watch it again. I just want to un-watch it. Is that an option?
-
Elsewhere
The best thing to do in any city is imagine a better one. Somewhere else, the light is different. The people understand you. You’d finally be yourself. But you’d unpack the same boxes, hang the same pictures, lie in the dark with the same thoughts just rearranged. No city fixes you. No street, no skyline,…