Nora Holzinger

 Through the Looking Glass I remember the day I found out I was unvaccinated.  I was struggling through the digital forms that would allow me to live on campus my freshman year of college, and I had to provide documentation that I was vaccinated appropriately.  I yelled downstairs to ask my mom if she had the documents.  “No” she shouted back.  “What? Where is it? What do you mean” I peppered her, finally leaving my room to come downstairs to the living room. “It doesn’t exist,” she said.  I was stunned.  She walked down the narrow basement stairs to rummage in the filing cabinet that held all my documents, and she returned from the depths of the storage room with a folded yellow card with my name and date of birth on it in her handwriting. Inside, the card was blank except for two lines – a polio vaccination and a tetanus shot at age two.  Living in a state with quite strict rules about vaccine exemptions, I had no choice – I had to get vaccinate...

 I lost my best friend to a cult.  We met in undergrad, studying similar disciplines in the same department and became close.  Brianna was effortlessly cool – she seemed to really know who she was and was comfortable in her own skin. She had this effortless thrifted style, was always reading about interesting topics, had a large group of fascinating friends. She was funny and smart and creative in ways I could only dream of being. A kind of joyous calm seemed to radiate off her, and as an incredibly depressed person at the time, I craved this energy.  For part of the time we lived in Baltimore City, she rented a room from this woman who lived in the wealthy, bohemian neighborhood of Mount Washington. In that kitchen she taught me vegan recipes, and we’d walk down the rainy autumnal street to a nearby yoga studio for the free community classes.   Back then, yoga felt euphoric. Finishing in corpse pose in the dim lighting of a yoga studio, my entire body had ...

“It sounds like he’s just trying to get rid of you rather than take any corrective action,” said my union steward.  His voice grew distant over the phone I held to my ear, and in my view of my kitchen turned into a long corridor.  Despite months of petty conflict with my teammates, it took an HR complaint from my supervisor alleging “insubordination” for me to realize I was in a toxic work environment and my own supervisor was at the center of it.  Suddenly all the small humiliations and injustices made sense.  Clear displeasure when I disclosed travel plans six months in advance.  An unfair performance evaluation.  Getting shafted in the new office seating arrangement.  Being left out of meetings about my subject area.  The sudden attitude change from teammates with whom I thought I had a good working relationship.  I confided in my coworker who was a higher-up before her own experience with a toxic work environment drove her to take a lower...

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...