Nora Holzinger

Debt freedom is more than just being rid of monthly payments. Over a flight of kombucha, Joanne and I get to talking about our finances. Friends for three years now, our easy conversation ranges across all the domains of our lives – love, money, work, creative pursuits. Sometimes, these take the form of PowerPoint presentations when a few weeks have lapsed between meetings. This day’s PowerPoint had exciting news. My student loan balances are now below $10,000 and I’m projected to pay that off in less than a year. Shocked, Joanne asks how that’s possible. She confides in me that she feels like she’s drowning in her debt and doesn’t know where all her money goes every month. She has medical debt, owes money to the IRS, and a five-figure credit card balance. She lamented that her list of debts only seems to grow – debts she feels like she’ll never be able to pay back.  By the time we leave the kombucha bar we’ve struck a deal. I will analyze her finances from the last year and help h...

  Right off the bat, let’s get something straight – I am not a vegan. I followed a vegan diet for about eight years, but I’m not currently.  However, as a public health epidemiologist, I’m starting to wonder if I should go back to veganism. COVID-19, Avian flu, anthrax, mad cow disease, and swine flu are all diseases that have “spilled over” into humans from the animals we eat.  With concern over Avian flu growing and the world still recovering from COVID, I’ve been wondering what long-term pandemic prevention would look like. And continued industrial farming isn’t part of that picture.  A recent article in Nature found that industrial fur farming is a “viral highway” where numerous infectious diseases are circulating - diseases with pandemic potential. Potentially pandemic pathogens are viruses, bacteria, and parasites that could spread quickly and easily in humans and could cause significant sickness and death. With not much difference in the living conditions b...

I peer at my too-bright phone screen, knowing I should be asleep – depression insomnia at an all-time high.  A young woman with perfect glowing skin in a perfectly manicured modern living room tells me that I just need to change my “self-concept” to achieve my goals and become “the woman of my dreams”.  If I just change my identity to “a person who eats healthy”, I will have no problem turning down the office breakroom doughnut or the ultra-processed food-filled girl’s night. I’m just not the kind of person who eats that stuff.  “Your mentality creates your reality.”  Well I guess my mentality created a reality where my job is a dead end, my skin is a mess, the earth is rapidly heating, I’ll never get out from under my student loans, and I’ll never lose the last ten pounds I gained after moving in with my partner.  I close the app and roll over. The next day, sitting in meditation a realization floated across the open sky of my mind.  What she was explainin...

“Ding dong - Doors opening. Step back and allow customers to exit…”  As I stand at the opening Metro train car doors, I sense another passenger behind me.  “They’re just letting men wear dresses these days, huh.”  It’s 10:30 at night and I’m coming home from work. I get a pit in my stomach and reassure myself there’s no way he’s talking to me. I’m a woman, and always have been.  However, we are the only ones in this train car, and I am wearing a dress.  --- I am over six feet tall, with a build better described as “statuesque” rather than “model-esque” – broad shoulders, flat chest, without the soft curves that would mark me as belonging to the ranks of the fairer sex.  This fact has been thrown in my face as long as I can remember – the fact that I am larger than most men and always will be.  Judith Butler, misunderstood feminist theorist, writes that gender is a performance. You are a woman because you perform the stereotypical social role of “woman”...

 For the people who aren’t living the life they dreamed. Courtesy of The Sunday Times Hannah Neelman, the pretty face of the Ballerina Farm social media accounts is a Julliard-trained ballerina and Mormon who married into the JetBlue dynasty and now lives on a farm in Utah with her eight children.  Lately, her videos have made their way through the YouTube algorithm to my feed, and they are a vision. She kneads sourdough on an antique butcher-block countertop, out the window are rolling green hills, the warm yellow sunlight lancing artfully through the window glass. All her cooking utensils are antique replicas made of metal, ceramic, and glass – a far cry from the plastic filled drawers of my own kitchen.  The next scene, a perfectly arranged plate of lemons nestled against three perfectly burnt pillar candles and an enamel colander filled with berries. Sometimes she’s not speaking at all and there’s inoffensive mid-century swing music playing over the video. Sometimes s...

This month’s global IT disruption is Y2K twenty-four years late. Does anyone else remember New Year’s Eve 1999? I don’t because I was a small child, but my father, who at the time was the systems editor for a west coast newspaper, remembers being at the office that night after accepting a retainer bonus and testing the main newspaper system for weeks, only to have to have nothing happen. No global computer crash, no grounded flights, no Armageddon. So, imagine my surprise upon arriving to my desk job at state government one warm July morning to find that about half of my floor had zero computer access. Thus unencumbered by the responsibilities of the workday, I sat around for eight hours and chitchatted with similarly effected colleagues. From my phone screen, I could see that this was not just our workplace, but flights, 911 operators, healthcare facilities. This is the Y2K fallout late-’90s doomsday preppers thought was coming, only about 24 years too late. However, this year’s Y2K i...