The Girl Scouts were setting up a folding table by the doors of the hardware store.

“Omigod,” I said to the cashier. “It’s March.”

The cashier looked at me flatly.

“Debit or credit?” she said.

“This is March,” I pointed out again. “Don’t you know what this means?“

She said nothing.

“It means cookies,” I said.

She cleared her throat. “Sir. There’s a line.”

I paid for my wares, then hurried out to the Girl Scout cookies. I did a quick inventory check, using my cookie-sonar to investigate the boxes on the Scouts’ table.

I was not looking for Trefoils or Do-si-dos, Tagalongs, Lemon-Ups, or Adventurefuls. Neither Samoas nor Toffee-Tastics. I was looking for a uniquely mint-chocolatey cookie which is an American institution in and of itself; a cookie that tastes like I’m about to transition to wearing sweatpants full time.

“Do you have any Thin Mints?” I asked the little girls.

The girl who answered was very matter-of-fact. Her name was Mary Kate. And from the looks of her sash, she is an overachiever.

“Yes. We have Thin Mints.”

One of the

Scout moms whispered. “Ask him if he’d like some.”

Another Scout answered. Her voice was quiet. Her name was Amelie. She was also a highly decorated officer.

“How many boxes?” she asked.

I wanted to say, “I’ll take as many as you can sell me without losing your jobs.” But I showed restraint. I only asked for seven boxes.

I am a big fan of the Girl Scouts. In a modern age when nearly every classic American pastime is belittled and threatened, I like knowing the Girls Scouts are still kicking.

This nation has lost sit-down family dinners, newspapers, even the sport of baseball has undergone modern rule changes. (There is no clock in baseball.)

The Boy Scouts have been the victim of culture wars and bankruptcy. Dr. Seuss has been taken off the shelves. But the…

Our shower drain kept getting clogged. It was a big problem. We had to hire a plumber. He came out twice.

God love him, the plumber did not look happy the second time. Namely, because our house is 100 years old. Meaning, five generations of people have been bathing in this house. The drain pipes have been whisking away one century’s worth of funk water.

“No telling what’s in those pipes,” the plumber said in a quiet, ominous voice, gazing into the treacherous blackness of the drain hole.

The plumber and his young assistant, Charlie, spent an hour working on the problem. The plumber is not a tiny man. He did a lot of bending over while Charlie would laugh, pointing at his boss’s partially exposed gluteal cleft, and saying, “Crack kills, boss.”

They located the clog.

Charlie found me in my office. He was breathless and excited. “We found it!” Charlie said these words in the same weighty tones NASA engineers would use to say, “Houston, the Eagle has landed.”

Three of us stood in a tiny bathroom, looking

at the source of the clog, lying in the plumber’s hand.

“I’ve never seen a ball of funk that big before,” said Charlie.

The clot was a rat’s nest of human hair about the size of a golf ball. The hair was old, so it just looked black and green.

“Probably your wife’s hair,” said the plumber.

He’s probably right, I was thinking. My wife has the longest hair in our house. Moreover, I’ve seen the aftermath of her showers. Whenever she washes her hair, the shower stall looks like she’s just finished bathing a border collie.

So, I told my wife about the ball of funk. She became very defensive.

Her main defense was, “It wasn’t MY HAIR!”

I had to laugh. Her thick, brunette hair comes down to her mid-back. Who else’s hair could it be?

“What about…

What if I told you that you are enough?

Moreover, what if you woke up this morning and, for the first time ever, you actually felt like enough. What if you loved yourself? And I mean really loved yourself.

Do you love yourself? Let’s find out.

Are you a perfectionist? No? Yes? Have you ever asked WHY you’re a perfectionist? Have you ever wondered why you strive to be flawless so that nobody will find a reason to judge you?

Or are you a people pleaser? Ever wonder why? How did you become a doormat? Why do you fall all over yourself to ensure everyone will like you? Would showing them the real you be that bad?

Or maybe you’re critical. Maybe you nitpick those you love. Heck, maybe you nitpick yourself. Maybe you look in the mirror and think, “I’m so fat and ugly.”

Perhaps you see photos of yourself and react with true disgust, thinking, “I’m so old and wrinkled. Look at all this flab underneath my neck, jiggling like Jello salad.”

Maybe you don’t like your nose. Or

your teeth. Or the shape of your bootymus maximus.

Then again, maybe you dislike yourself in much simpler ways. Maybe you’re embarrassed about your bank account. “Omigod. Is this ALL you have in savings? What a loser.”

Maybe you don’t like where you are in your career. What a freaking disappointment you are. You should’ve been MUCH further along in your field by now. Instead, you’re just a supporting actor in someone else’s made-for-TV drama.

Maybe you don’t feel smart enough. Maybe you are socially anxious. Maybe you think you’re too much of an introvert. You’re a classic procrastinator. You feel invisible. You hate your hair. You wish you were prettier. Skinnier. Funnier. Happier.

Either way, your inner critic is always screaming,“You’re not enough!” You’ve tried to shut up this blowhard for years. But it doesn’t work. The inner…

Don’t shoot the messenger. But in America, one third of children have never handwritten a letter.

And it’s not just kids. Nearly 40 percent of adult Americans haven’t written a letter in the last five years, while 43 percent of Millennials have never sent a letter in their lifetime. But even if they had sent a letter, recent studies show that Gen Z can’t read cursive and has no idea what the heck Grandma’s handwriting means.

The New York Times says that “The age of proper correspondence writing has ended…”

“Letter writing is an endangered art,” The Atlantic said.

“The death knell of written correspondence has been sounding for years,” said the Chicago Tribune.

This is not new information, of course, unless you’ve been living underneath a slab of granite. Letters have been replaced by emails and texts.

But texts and emails are not letters. An email has no charm. A text message does not impart tenderness, and intimacy. You cannot smell the paper. You cannot feel the weight of stationary in your

hands. An email is temporary. An email will only last as long as your device is charged.

Plus, did you know that email is a leading cause of anxiety in this country?

Fact: Around 92 percent of working Americans feel anxiety when they think about their email inbox.

But a letter. A letter is real. A letter exists in physical space. A letter lasts. You cannot “delete” a letter unless you burn it. There are letters that still exist from 500 BC. Letters from early Romans. Letters from kings and queens, from soldiers of the American Revolution.

A letter is artwork. It is culture. It is tangible language. A letter represents years of handwriting practice in Mrs. Burns penmanship class, as she peered over her cat eye glasses at you, swatting a ruler in her open palm, bearing the same facial expression as a prison guard.

A…

I woke up, staggered from my bedroom, and made coffee. I pulled out my phone, and commenced to scroll social media.

On my screen, a young woman, in pajamas, dancing in her kitchen. She was maybe mid twenties, with a pierced nose, and extremely hairy armpits.

I wiped sleep from my eyes and tried to understand what I was looking at.

It was early in the morning. My brain could not piece together why my newsfeed was showing me feminine armpit hair first thing in the morning.

Who was this unshaven woman? Why was she dancing in her kitchen as opposed to, say, her bathroom? Why do people post dance videos on social media? And more importantly, why is this video on MY newsfeed?

This young woman is a stranger to me. We are not online friends. I’ve never seen her before in my life. Of this I am certain; I never forget an armpit.

Thus, I can only assume the bushy dancer

is on my newsfeed because of algorithms.

Which is probably why the next video on my newsfeed depicted quasi-naked Japanese people sliding down a waterslide into a vat of whipped cream. But hey, at least their pits were trimmed.

I remember when I first signed up for social media. Back then, we didn’t have algorithms or AI selecting what was in our newsfeed. In fact, we didn’t even call it “social media.” We called it “wasting time.”

In those days, you fired up your PC with a ripcord, then you used dial-up internet that took four or five years to connect.

Social media was still in its infancy, and was still an important application many middle-aged people used to discover whether or not their highschool sweethearts had gotten fat.

The main function of social media in those days was posting stuff. It was kinda fun. You’d make…