Author Archives: g24khamr

FIRST YOU HAVE A RESUME. You build it, hone it, compile it like a greatest hits album. A one-page masterpiece of adjectives and bullet points. Later you create a bio, a superlative narrative of your experience, skills, and passions. The resume is a black-and-white television, but a bio is an 85-inch 4K entertainment system withContinue reading “Remembering What a Career is Really About”

“I started the morning crying.” This was how Emma Hemming-Willis began her Instagram video marking her husband Bruce Willis’ 68th birthday. The former action star has dementia – and while the video showed a smiling Bruce Willis singing along with his family, Emma didn’t want to pretend that every day was a good day. HerContinue reading “Love Unfiltered: Learning to Lean into Grief”

WE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIANS ARE INURED TO EARTHQUAKES. We did the drills in elementary school, packed the survival kits and planned our escape routes. And when a major quake happened – Northridge in 1994, Whittier in 1987, Sylmar in 1971 – we stood in our doorways and lit our candles and waited for power and safetyContinue reading “Blankets and Body Bags”

I’m typically not one for anthologies or looking back. The future is almost always more interesting, not to mention that stories are better when you don’t know how they end. Two years removed from my first bout with Covid, however, and the story continues. Not for me (though I did go one more round withContinue reading “Make Sure They Don’t Die in the Parking Lot: A Pandemic Story”

“IS ANYBODY GOING TO DIE?” This was the first thing my therapist said after ten minutes of anxiety-fueled ranting. Ten minutes of what I thought was a pretty good case for The World Ending, an inevitable demise that was all my fault and I’ll never recover and how could this happen before I’d ever getContinue reading “What Happens Next”

Great art is indistinguishable from magic. The artist not unlike a God among mortals. Sometimes the art is so great, so perfect, such a “normal” occurrence, we forget about the artist. And that’s natural – most of us don’t think about Gods every second of every day. We go about our lives, secure in theContinue reading “Art and Magic”

You don’t have to be a football fan to feel for what happened to Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin on Monday night. A young man, doing what he loves, collapses and goes into cardiac arrest. One moment normal, the next unbelievable. The game stops, the teammates gather and pray. Timeout on the field. We don’tContinue reading “Timeout on the Field”

TWO PEOPLE DIED IN THE PAST TWO WEEKS. Okay, obviously a lot more than two people. People die every day, every hour, every second. Death doesn’t take time off. What I mean is two people died this week and I miss them, but not in the same way. One of them was a neighbor forContinue reading “The Two Faces of Grief”

I’VE NEVER BEEN THAT PERSON. The one who doesn’t keep up with change. The one who eschews new technology out of some self-righteous adherence to a past that was never meant to remain static. The past IS prologue — time and time again. My job has always been to keep moving forward, to find what’sContinue reading “Battling Ageism in the Web3 Age”

This picture was taken in 1941 in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. German soldiers are surrounding Jews in the Market Square, and we all know what happened after that. My family left Zhytomyr decades earlier. I never thought about that place much, never visited, never felt like I had to. It was the Old Country, not My Country.Continue reading “You Don’t Have to Live Somewhere to Call it Home”