All posts tagged: Deserves

Stuffing deserves a life beyond Thanksgiving

Stuffing deserves a life beyond Thanksgiving

Back when Twitter was still the kind of place where a stray observation could become communal property by lunchtime — before the app hardened quite so completely into a highly polarized, hyper-monetized digital town square populated by tech founders and crypto traders flashing what’s beneath their metaphorical trench coats — one particular idea seemed to resurface every so often: You can simply buy yourself a birthday cake. The version I remember best was comedian Andrew Nadeau’s: “Turns out you can just buy a birthday cake anytime and eat it yourself. Nobody checks.” And, in the Twitter style of the time, once somebody landed on the joke, everyone else began taking little runs at it: refining the wording, extending the premise, adding nachos or Diet Coke or the marvel of having “adult money.” The revelation remained essentially the same. There is no birthday-cake authority. No one at the bakery asks for identification. No clerk leans across the counter and demands proof that a candle-worthy occasion has actually occurred. Over here on the savory side, I’m equally …

Who Deserves Your Pearls?

Who Deserves Your Pearls?

For New Year’s, I often choose a slogan—a personal mantra—that helps keep me on track in the year ahead. I repeat it to myself when I feel myself drifting toward whatever it is I’m trying not to do. It serves as a kind of guardrail. This year’s slogan isn’t the usual two or three words. Instead, it’s a well-known proverb from the most famous sermon ever delivered: Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Some people are surprised by how blunt the gentle man from Galilee could be when he said, “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” The proverb is usually shortened to: Don’t cast your pearls before swine. The wisdom here is an instruction in discernment—about being thoughtful and selective with the people with whom you share what you hold sacred, your “pearls.” Those pearls may include your time, your hopes and dreams, the traumas you’ve survived, cherished memories of loved …