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" People have always taken photos of themselves, either with camera timers or by handing their Nikons over to strangers in foreign countries and then paying large sums to get them back. "
Meghan Daum
Always
Camera
Strangers
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" In the world of opinion writing, there's something called the 'to be sure' paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point. "
Meghan Daum
World
Moving
Moving On
" Almost nothing is more tedious than complaining about the weather. "
Meghan Daum
Complaining
Weather
More
" We're not handed situations based on our established likes and dislikes; we get what's available. "
Meghan Daum
Likes
Situations
Available
" What I want is to have people's notion of adulthood no longer be so defined by being a parent. There is some kind of conventional wisdom that you're not really a mature person until you become a parent. "
Meghan Daum
Want
Kind
You
" Posting a brag, humble or otherwise, and then waiting for people to respond is the equivalent of having a conversation in which all you do is wait for your turn to speak. "
Meghan Daum
Waiting
You
Speak
" I am weary of happiness, both as a word and as a concept. "
Meghan Daum
Weary
Concept
Happiness
" Old-fashioned girl that I am, I still have a landline, though it rarely rings - and when it does, especially without warning, there's rarely anything good on the other end. "
Meghan Daum
Warning
Without
Girl
" In a world of oversharing, we don't want to be unknown or unseen. We don't want to be left out. "
Meghan Daum
Unseen
Left
Want
" The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It's not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it's to challenge people, and it's to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things. "
Meghan Daum
Writing
Think
Tell
" People who choose not to have kids do so because they respect the job of parenting so much that they know not to take it on if they know it's not something that they're up for, and I don't know what to be a bigger tribute to parenting than that. "
Meghan Daum
Respect
Job
Parenting
" What I think is important about essayists - about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view - is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way. "
Meghan Daum
Kind
Think
Important
" Checking email every 45 seconds is not only compulsive, it's presumptuous. It suggests a belief that anyone who sends us a message needs us to read it immediately, even if the message is from SkyMall telling us our Bigfoot Garden Yeti statue has shipped. "
Meghan Daum
Email
Us
Message
" It is important for children to grow up in a world where there are all kinds of adults and role models around them, for them to know it's not just parents and people who are parents that care about them, but that there are people who are living other kinds of lives. "
Meghan Daum
Care
World
People
" It's great that Time is moving in the direction of validating those who, by choice or circumstance, will never be parents. But the point is not simply that society should stop judging those of us who don't have children. It's that society actually needs us. Children need us. "
Meghan Daum
Great
Children
Time
" It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I'd been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining. "
Meghan Daum
Moving
Me
Challenge
" I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people. "
Meghan Daum
Early
Always
Journalism
" Before digital and mobile communications effectively tethered us to an invisible, infinite 'wire,' even those with the most hectic schedules were usually willing to answer the phone if they happened to be home when it rang. "
Meghan Daum
Digital
Home
Infinite
" Opinion is dominating, which is absolutely ridiculous - there wouldn't be anything for people to have opinions about if there weren't people out there gathering facts on the ground. "
Meghan Daum
Ground
Opinion
People
" Though I probably shouldn't admit this, the activities and pursuits in which I've achieved any measure of success are, without exception, activities and pursuits that came easily to me from the beginning. "
Meghan Daum
Success
Measure
Me
" I love writing essays and articles, so it's hard for me to resist taking assignments that inevitably pull me away from larger projects. "
Meghan Daum
Me
Hard
Away
" Quitting Facebook would be like partially erasing myself. Quitting Twitter would constitute further erasure. Pretty soon, I'd be invisible. I was never on Instagram or Tumblr, which I guess means I never completely existed in the first place. "
Meghan Daum
Pretty
Invisible
Myself
" You don't realize how much a dog's presence defines the contours of your home until, in its absence, the walls seem to relocate themselves. "
Meghan Daum
Home
Realize
Dog
" Social media, despite its reputation as the ultimate agent of self-promotion, actually feeds on self-loathing. "
Meghan Daum
Social
Reputation
Media
" I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in. "
Meghan Daum
Genre
Work
Love
" I loved Woody Allen's short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes. "
Meghan Daum
Short
Loved
Intellectual
" Mother's Day, like motherhood itself, is fraught with peril. There are so many ways to get it wrong, so many opportunities to disappoint and be disappointed. "
Meghan Daum
Day
Motherhood
Mother
" For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked. "
Meghan Daum
Writing
Up
Much
" The reason it was so bruising when someone said I was from a rich family is that, like many of us, I'm deeply invested - probably overly so - in the myth of my own self-creation. I like to believe that I got where I am, such as it is, by working hard and charting my own course. "
Meghan Daum
Believe
Family
I Am
" I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything will ever beat the view I had from my desk window in my little farmhouse in Nebraska. Just a dirt road stretching out as far as you could see, with prairie grass on either side. "
Meghan Daum
Road
View
Tree
" I've always been interested in this notion of what is authentic and how we define that and why our culture imposes certain emotions and emotional constraints onto experiences. "
Meghan Daum
Culture
Define
Emotions