Tag: writing

The Truth About Happiness: It’s Not Always Happy

Comic panel: a woman in a green hoodie holds coffee and gives a thumbs-up, saying “I’M DOING EVERYTHING IS FINE!” Her thought bubble reads, “I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE. SO EXHAUSTED... EVERYONE IS DEPENDING ON ME. I NEED TO HIDE IT.” Text below reads “THE FACADE.”
A tired worker hides overwhelming stress behind a reassuring smile and thumbs-up.

“I’m on the pursuit of happiness, and I know/ Everything that shine ain’t always gonna be gold/ Hey, I’ll be fine once I get it/ I’ll be good”- Kid Cudi.

We treat happiness like a destination. Chase it long enough, the thinking goes, and you’ll finally arrive and stay there. But that idea is backward, and it’s setting people up to feel broken for no reason.

Happiness Isn’t a Permanent State

Happiness is tied to a moment, not a lifestyle. It’s the spike you get from a specific event like getting good news, nailing a deal, or a great surprise, not a baseline you maintain forever. Psychologically, it works like a dopamine response: something raises it, then it comes back down. That’s not a flaw in the system. That’s the system.

The cultural script we’re handed says otherwise. We’re told to “pursue happiness,” as if catching it means we’re set for good. But that pursuit can become its own trap, chasing a peak as though it’s a permanent address instead of recognizing it as a visit.

What We Actually Mean Is Contentment

Most of what people call “being happy” is really contentment: a steady, low-key sense that life is okay, that you can handle what’s in front of you. Contentment doesn’t spike and crash the way happiness does. It’s the quieter, sturdier feeling underneath the highlight-reel moments.

Joy is a third, related thing — a recurring capacity to feel light and good, even though it coexists with hard stuff. The people who seem genuinely joyful aren’t immune to sadness or depression. They don’t treat hard days as proof something’s wrong with them. They feel the rough day, name it, talk about it, and move back toward joy without faking their way through the gap.

Why the “Be Happy Always” Pressure Backfires

Comic text: “This new issue is unbelievable, you have to read it!” A smiling attendee imagines being isolated, tired, not happy, and alone, thinking, “I’m so exhausted... can’t stop the feeling.”
A cheerful convention attendee conceals feelings of isolation, exhaustion, and unhappiness behind a bright smile.

Telling someone they need to be happy all the time quietly tells them something is wrong with them whenever they’re not. And the truth is, no one is happy 100% of the time; that’s not a personal failure, it’s just how happiness works.

Worse, pushing nonstop happiness as the goal can edge toward something that looks a lot like mania once it’s sustained too long or too forcefully. Authenticity matters more than constant cheerfulness. A person who’s “on” all the time, no exceptions, is worth a second look, not celebration.

Faking it also has a real cost. Forcing yourself to perform happiness instead of working through what you’re actually feeling leads to burnout, and once you experience burnout, it’s much harder to recover from than an honest bad day ever was.

A Better Way to Talk About It

Sadness isn’t the same as depression. Feeling disturbed, sad, or grieving something doesn’t mean you’re broken; it means you’re human, and you’re allowed to feel it. Letting people name their emotions accurately, instead of forcing everything into “happy” or “not happy,” gives them room to actually process what’s going on.

A healthier approach looks like this: something good happens, you notice it, you sit in gratitude for it, and happiness grows out of that rather than demanding a constant happy state and panicking when it slips.

The Real Misconception

The myth isn’t that happiness exists. It’s that happiness is supposed to be constant. It isn’t, and it was never meant to be. What we should actually be building day to day is contentment and joy, with happiness as the bright, occasional spark that visits on top of them. Once we stop conflating the three, we can finally use the right language for what we’re feeling and stop mistaking an honest bad day for a sign that something’s broken.

One of my favorite songs is Kid Cudi’s “Pursuit of Happiness.” You can check out the videoà https://youtu.be/7xzU9Qqdqww?si=xdwbE1tJEFSvIPDp

Also, if you would like to buy me some Fresh Market Cookies to bring some happiness à Ko-fi.com/chemichelletales

0

Stop Blocking Intersections: A Call for Better Driving

An Open Letter to Every Bad Driver in Baltimore (You Know Who You Are)
Let me set the scene. It’s Saturday morning. I have one goal: get to my free dance fitness class, get my sun, get my vitamin D, be shining and brined. Instead, I get a masterclass in why nobody in this city knows how to drive anymore.
Here’s what happened, and here’s everything I learned about humanity in the process.

The GPS Lied to Me
My GPS said ten minutes. I believed it, because apparently I have not learned my lesson after twenty-some years of this app betraying me. Ten minutes turned into fifteen minutes stuck in one spot, for a destination that was two minutes away. Two. Minutes.
Why? Construction, and zero traffic cops to direct the chaos. So there I sat, marinating in my own poor life choices, wondering if I should just park and walk the rest of the way. (I did not. I am not that strong.)
Do Not Block the Intersection, I Am Begging You!


This is not a suggestion. This is not a vibe. This is the law, and yet every single day someone decides their five minutes matter more than four lanes of traffic. If you block the box, you are now sitting in the intersection on a red light, which means you have doubled the violation. You didn’t save time. You created a second traffic jam on top of the first one. Congratulations, you’re now the problem and the punishment.
Nobody Uses Their Turn Signal Anymore and I Refuse to Accept This
When did we all collectively decide that using a blinker was optional? It is not optional. It is a tool. It exists so the person behind you does not have to guess your intentions like you’re a mystery box. If I’m going straight and my signal isn’t on, do not honk at me because you wanted to turn. That’s a you problem. Slow down or go around. I promise I will not take it personally if you pass me, in fact I might speed up out of spite, and then you’ll be mad for a whole new reason.


A Brief and Unnecessary Physics Lesson
If you’re riding my bumper in the right lane while I do the speed limit, please know that I have done the math. Going five or ten miles over the limit does not get you there dramatically faster. It gets you there a few minutes faster and significantly more likely to be dead. Force equals mass times acceleration, the human body can only absorb so much of that force before something inside you gives up, and I would like to keep my organs exactly where they are. Speed limits exist because somebody already did this math for us. Take the win.
(Side-eye directed squarely at anyone doing seventy-five in a fifty-five like the laws of physics were personally written to inconvenience them.)


To the Person Doing 35 on I-95 During Rush Hour


Listen here, hon, I need you to hear me before I call you stupid or ask, “Are you Dumb?” The highway is not the place for this. If your car cannot safely handle highway speeds, that’s a mechanical problem, not a personality trait, and it needs to go to a shop, not onto a road where everyone else is doing sixty-five. If you’re scared to drive at highway speed, there is no shame in that, truly, but the solution is a rideshare or a rental, not turning I-95 into a rolling roadblock at nine in the morning. City streets exist. Please use them.
Everyone Is Just Rude Now, and I’m Tired
No signals. No thank-you waves. No basic courtesy. Just horns, attitude, and everybody acting like their destination is more important than everyone else’s. Traffic isn’t just bad because of construction or rush hour. It’s bad because we collectively stopped being decent to each other behind the wheel. It’s a two-way street, literally, and treating it like your own personal racetrack does not make you look powerful. It makes you look like you have somewhere to be and nowhere to grow.
The Only Solution That Actually Worked
I put on Prince’s “Purple Rain.” Traffic cleared shoot out to Goddess Inanna for that vibration hack( https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWIOdglAC2U/?stkn=MXQ2cGN4a3NwMWJ5cw==) . This has now worked for me twice, so as far as I’m concerned it’s science at this point, not a coincidence. Do with that information what you will.

In Conclusion
If you don’t remember the rules of the road, go take a defensive driving refresher. If you’re an aggressive driver because you have a big truck and main character energy, maybe put some of that gas money toward therapy instead. I say this with love, and also as someone who is absolutely one of the bad drivers sometimes. We are all works in progress out here. I missed my dance class. I made it to my backup class instead, because I refuse to let bad drivers take two workouts from me in one day. And honestly, that might be the real lesson here: traffic will test you, but it will not stop you from getting your steps in.
Drive safe. Use your signal. Don’t block the box. And maybe put on some Prince.

If you want to pay for my next oil change or tires –>   Ko-fi.com/chemichelletales

0

A Field Guide to Fate, As Told Through Parking Spaces

Another WordPress Prompt about a weird coincidence.

Some couples bond over shared taste in music, or a mutual hatred of raisins. My person and I bond over parking spots. Specifically: our unexplainable, borderline-conspiratorial ability to park within two spots of each other, at completely different times, having told no one our plans, like two magnets who also enjoy going to the movies.

It started on our second date, a date that, in retrospect, had main character’s energy baked in from the jump. The mall had blocked off my usual spot for some event, so I got exiled to the far reaches of a different lot, somewhere in the metaphysical vicinity of Bass Pro Shop. Mildly annoyed, I parked, walked in, and found my late-because-he-hates-previews soon-to-be boyfriend. We settled on watching “The Woman King” on the second date, trying to feel each other out, but we didn’t finish. Because some idiot discharged his gun in the food court by accident. Security evacuated the mall due to the gunshots, which ended the movie early. I want to be clear that was genuinely terrifying, and not something to make light of, and my heart still goes out to anyone who has lived through more horrible, deadly shootings.  

My son-to-be boyfriend stayed by my side and made sure I got to my car.  He left to find his car once I told him I saw my car and was safe. It was very sweet and checked the chivalrous box for me. Amid the chaos and the evacuation, something almost comical happened: note that we arrived at the theater at different times, and we never saw each other’s car after the first date. We met at a mutual location. We discovered we were in the same row, two spots apart. The only thing standing between his car and mine was a stranger’s Honda that had already pulled off once he went to look for his car.

I was sitting there eating a multigrain croissant like a raccoon who’d found a snack. I felt a pair of eyes on me, so I looked around, and he was looking at me. I rolled down my windows, crumbs from the croissant falling from my lips.  He asked, “Why do you have croissants in your car?” and honestly, sir, why wouldn’t I? I am always on the go. I laughed at the irony of how he ended up in the same row at Arundel Mills.  He asked if I was hungry, and I nodded yes.  The croissant wasn’t going to cut it. Well, do you want to go to this Mexican restaurant, away from the madness? I smiled and said yeah. We wove through the chaotic traffic as people evacuated the mall.  We ended up at a Mexican restaurant, margaritas in hand, laughing about how our second date somehow included a national tragedy narrowly avoided. We found out that someone accidentally discharged their weapon in the mall, still scary. As he told it, he learned the origin story of my love for a good baked good. I enjoyed the conversation, and thought to myself, he would be nice to date. (My intuition was right; we are three years in and counting.)

Fast forward to Sunday night, we decided to see Spider-Man. We met up at the theater; I arrived first, and he arrived later.  After the movie, we walked to the parking lot. He offered to drive me to my car.  I pointed straight ahead; as usual, we were parked two rows behind me, like the universe always wants us in the same zip code of a parking lot. We didn’t plan it. We never plan it. It just… happens every time.

I don’t know what force is at play here magnetism, fate, or the fact that we’re both drawn to whatever’s closest to the mall entrance- but I’ve decided not to question it. I’m just going to keep quietly tracking our dating anniversary (don’t tell him), keep bringing weird snacks into my car, and keep trusting that wherever I park, my person’s car will show up nearby, like it always does.

Some people believe in horoscopes. I believe in parking lots.

If you would like to sponsor a movie date, à Buy MichelleCheese a Coffee

0

Hitchhiker Chronicles

Comic scene: “Huh? A ride to the train station? I’m just the trivia host, mate...” “Excuse me, I know this is a trivia night, but is there a way I can get a ride to the train station? My Uber canceled!” Signs read “TRIVIA NIGHT!” and papers read “ANSWER”; sound effects say “BUZZZ!”, “CHEER!”, and “MURMUR.”
A trivia host tries to help a stranded guest reach the train station during trivia night.

Another WordPress writing prompt from August 2026 that I saved for this 30-day challenge. Question: What’s the weirdest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?

There is a massive neon sign invisible to the naked eye that must be tattooed directly across my forehead. It doesn’t say Welcome, and it certainly doesn’t say Sensible Adult. No, it clearly reads: Designated Shepherd of the Lost, the Confused, and the Mildly Terrifying. I have a fatal flaw. I possess a heart entirely too big for the Mid-Atlantic region, paired with a dose of Catholic guilt to prevent people from accidentally orchestrating their own demise.

Take, for instance, a rainy night at Stan and Joe’s in Annapolis back in 2024. I was hosting trivia, a respectable side hustle, that requires intense focus, reading comprehension, and the ability to ignore drunk people arguing over the capital of Nebraska. ( The Capital of Nebraska is Lincoln.) Enter a woman from the Northeast with a dream, zero grasp of Maryland geography, and a plot straight out of a low-budget indie thriller.

Between my trivia questions, she casually announced she was taking “the night bus” to Washington, D.C., to finalize paperwork on a house she didn’t want to live in. In a torrential downpour. From downtown Annapolis. At 8:00 PM. Now, anyone with a single functioning brain cell knows Annapolis public transit clocks out when the sun goes down. (I have been schooled that their transit system does not clock out at sundown, but it does not head to DC.) There is no magical night bus. No secret subway tunnel links historic dockside pubs directly to the Washington Monument. When I broke the news that she was stranded, she looked at me like I had personally canceled the transit grid. Naturally, her backup plan was to “just catch the train.” Honey, what train? I thought to myself, my left eye starting to squint.

Because the universe decided I was her court-appointed guardian angel, I had her call her friend and verified she wasn’t completely hallucinating a friend who lived in DC. Once verified, we struck a bargain: wait until I finish yelling about pop culture to the midshipmen and millennial players. I would drive her all the way to Baltimore Penn Station so you can catch an Amtrak to DC.  She agreed, and since the rain still hadn’t stopped, it was a decent deal.

Did she wait quietly? Absolutely not. While I was on the mic, she peppered me with her entire lifetime backstory, eventually announcing, unprompted, “You know, I’m a Libertarian.” Pulling out her pocket-sized Constitution.  Ma’am. I am reading a question about The Golden Girls. I do not care about your stance on America’s fiscal policy; I care that you don’t freeze on West Street.

I finally loaded this mysterious runaway into my car. I thought to myself: Was she an undercover spy? A time traveler? An alien seeking safe passage out of Anne Arundel County? Was a black SUV full of syndicate hitmen pulling up to the bar ten minutes after we left? The drama my brain created was better than any Netflix drama. I navigated construction traffic, listened to a podcast-worthy monologue about her existence, deposited her safely at Penn Station by 11:00 PM, and sped off to pick up my mother from work, wholly accepting that I am a giant sucker.

That was Hitchhiker Number One: a woman who weaponized sheer helplessness.

Hooded pedestrian standing in a rainy street viewed from inside a car
A driver watches a hooded pedestrian through a rain-streaked windshield on a neon-lit street.

Hitchhiker Number Two, however, skipped the paperwork and went straight for vehicular assault.

Cut to a recent evening on Edmondson Road out in Beltsville. For those unfamiliar, this is not a well-lit suburban boulevard. This is a narrow, twisty, ditch-flanked road cutting through farmland. It screams mystery episode.

I’m driving along, minding my own business and stressing about closing out tasks before starting my new job, when a man materializes out of the rural ether. Work boots, blue jeans, silver-white hair, a blue Haines T-shirt, and the pièce de résistance: a crinkly white plastic grocery bag.

He didn’t stick his thumb out like a polite 1970s nomad. He stepped into the road and aggressively lunged toward my moving vehicle, eyes locked on my door handle with the absolute determination of a zombie who missed the last commuter rail. He was getting in that car, with or without my permission.

I don’t have the calendar availability to get murdered on a country back road. I slammed the gas, violently swerved away from him, nearly pitched my entire car sideways into an agricultural ditch, and peeled out like an extra in an action franchise. The windows went up immediately.

So that is where we stand. On one end of the spectrum, I am a freelance chauffeur rescuing wandering souls from their own logistical ignorance. On the other, I am evading ambush attacks in the Beltsville brush.

I’ve since adopted a strict self-defense mechanism: I keep the passenger side of my car littered with enough junk that offering anyone a seat is physically impossible. My windows stay up, my doors stay locked, and my inner bleeding-heart Samaritan has officially clocked out!

If you would like to donate to the hitchhiker prevention fund à https://ko-fi.com/chemichelletales

I have another one I will post in a few days.

0

Moments of Kindness: How Strangers Impact Our Lives

Illustrated woodland pond with ripples, golden reflections, and berry branches
Golden reflections ripple across a quiet woodland pond surrounded by berry-laden branches.

Side note: Another Daily prompt I saw on WordPress. I can’t find the draft of this original prompt, but I still wanted to post it and try to keep up with my 30 days of posts. I should have labeled which day was which. What’s a Moment When a Stranger Completely Restored Your Faith in People?

There are so many moments I could talk about that renewed my faith in people, because I am a fortunate person. I won’t sit here and pretend otherwise. Throughout my life, people have always helped me, been there for me, listened, and offered sage wisdom. I want to talk about a few of those times.

The first happened during my first year of graduate school. I was in my twenties. I was dumb, in the way we all are in our twenties. I was in love with a man I thought I’d marry. We had just broken up. He wanted to date other people, and I told him I understood, and then I threw myself into school. I studied. I worked. Then, after a final exam, on a day when I was already emotionally drained, I saw him kiss another woman.

My brain couldn’t process it. I thought I’d failed the exam. I thought I was wasting my time and my money, that maybe everyone who ever doubted me was right. I sat on the green line train and cried, silently, trying not to let anyone see.

A young man came up to me He must have been younger than I was; he looked barely twenty-five Heck, he looked like he was in his early 20s I guess witnessing a grown woman cry on the subway made him pause He asked if I was okay I told him I was going through a lot And without knowing anything about what had happened to me the exam seeing my ex, he spoke life into me He told me that no matter what I was going through, it would be okay, and that someone out there would show up for me and be there for me I don’t remember every word. Still, I remember what it did It poured kindness back into a place that had gone empty.

Yes I used AI sorry.

Then he said something I still think about. He said, “You passed that test.” I hadn’t told him about the exam, and he said, “That man’s not your man. Everything’s gonna work out.” My train came; I thought he’d get on with me. Still, he told me to have a good life and stayed on the platform. When I looked back through the window, he was gone. I went back to that train around that same time for days afterward, hoping to find him, just to say thank you, just to buy him a cup of coffee. I never saw him again. I don’t know his name. Still, I carry him with me, and I thank him in my spirit to this day. I did pass that class. That relationship ended, and it turned out to be the freeing thing he told me it would be.

I used bitmoji this time. Gotta keep you on your toes.

Another time, I went whitewater rafting with friends. I was thrown from the raft into the water. I swam to a rock to wait, just as I’d been told to do if that ever happened A group of strangers, people who didn’t know me at all, pulled me into their raft and carried me back to my own group I was so grateful someone was willing to help a person they had never met If they hadn’t stopped for me, I don’t know how long I would have been stranded on those rocks Probably not long, we were with a tour group, and they had a raft behind us on purpose to save anyone who became hurt, injured, or stranded.

The last is something that has happened to me more than once: car accidents I’ve been in accidents that, by all rights, should have been much worse than they were Each time, whether it was an EMT, a police officer, or a bystander who stopped, someone has told me I was okay before I even knew to believe it myself One told me I needed to understand how fortunate I was, that she had seen people walk away from far less My cousin once saw the wreckage of one of my accidents and broke down crying, because she couldn’t understand how I had walked away from it Another time I was hit by a car going nearly ninety miles an hour. I had the green light and they ran the red light. You can only imagine the boom, it was epic like God sending a bolt of lighting to earth. I don’t remember getting out of the car, but i got out of the car and stood on the side of the street until EMTs showed up.  People kept asking me how I did it , because the door was sealed shut. I didn’t have an answer I still don’t.

I think about all of this, especially the man on the green line. He poured life into me on a day I thought I had hit rock bottom. He did it without asking for anything back. I will never see him again. I pray he is well, successful, and loved. I hope, somehow, he knows that I thank him from the bottom of my heart. These moments remind me that humanity is still capable of good, and I hold onto them with gratitude.

Would you like to fund my next whitewater rafting trip, or maybe my return to grad school? –> Ko-fi.com/chemichelletales

Also I need to do better editing. Sorry for the typos.

0

Cosmos & Culture: Virgo Is Hot Girl (and Hot Boy) Summer Fight Me

CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v62), quality = 82?

Look, I know what you’re picturing when someone says “Virgo.” A woman in a cardigan alphabetizing her spice rack. A man color-coding a spreadsheet for fun, on a Saturday, voluntarily. The zodiac’s resident hall monitor, the friend who texts “per my last message” with their whole chest. And sure. That’s also true. But I’m here to make the case that underneath the clipboard and the critique, Virgos are quietly running the entire “hot girl summer / hot boy summer” economy. Megan Thee Stallion coined the phrase. Virgos have been living it since the Bronze Age.

The Receipts

Before we get into the chart math, let’s look at the lineup, because the lineup does most of the arguing for me: Michael Jackson. Beyoncé. Ludacris. Keke Palmer. Katt Williams. Prince Harry. Zendaya and  Jesus! Yes, I said Jesus, because there’s evidence he was born in September, not December. The whole point of this tangent is Virgos; almost all Virgos are a whole vibe. These are not people who blend into a room. These are people the room rearranges itself around. Case in point, Entertainment Weekly did the “Theater Seating Game” and 85% of the people in the game chose to sit near or next to Keke Palmer, a Virgo.  And here’s the part that should really annoy every Leo reading this: Virgo does it without asking for the spotlight. No sign throws a better main-character moment while insisting, with total sincerity, that they’re just “here to help.” It’s the chess move of charisma.

The Three Decans, or: Why Some Virgos Are Built Different

Every sign gets split into three 10-degree decans with their own sub-ruler, and Virgo’s decans basically read like a character creation screen for “how hot is this Virgo going to be, specifically.”

Decan 1 — Mercury (Aug 23–Sep 1). Double-ruled by Mercury, so this is Virgo at full concentration: quick-witted, fast-processing, fluent in sarcasm, allergic to inefficiency. This is your Michael Jackson decan, the one who watches a dance once and already has it down, who hears a melody and can already tell you where it’s going. Less “sexy,” more “terrifyingly competent,” which, let’s be honest, is its own kind of hot.

Decan 2 — Saturn (Sep 2–Sep 11). This is the superstar decan. Mercury’s cleverness gets bolted onto Saturn’s discipline and staying power, and you get people who don’t just have talent; they have career longevity Beyoncé territory, Ludacris territory. Saturn is the planet of time, structure, and “still relevant twenty years later,” and that’s exactly the energy: perfectionism is real, the critiques are real, but so is the global superstar that perfectionism eventually produces. Sidenote: I think all Virgos have this quality; from my analysis, Michael Jackson has a whole 60-year career, Keke Palmer, Zendaya, I mean they all the Virgos on this list are entering 20-plus years in the business of their choosing.

Decan 3 — Venus (Sep 12–Sep 22). Venus softens the whole operation — beauty, aesthetics, charm, the ability to walk into an award show and have people quietly rearrange the seating chart to sit near you (looking at you, Keke Palmer, but her bday is actually August 26th, so she’s in the first decan, not the 3rd, but this effect is Keke’s energy to a “T”). This decan turns Mercury’s planning and Saturn’s discipline into something that feels good to be around. It’s the secret sauce decan. It’s also, conveniently, your Katt Williams decan, proof that “Venus-ruled” doesn’t only mean soft; it can also mean a man who silences an entire internet for a year with one interview.

Unhealed vs. Healed: A Public Service Announcement

Here’s the asterisk, because I’m not going to sit here and pretend Virgo doesn’t have a setting. Unhealed Virgo is still fun, genuinely the life of the party in small doses. Still, the nitpicking, the running commentary on everything you’re doing slightly wrong, the critique delivered as a love language: you need that in monthly increments, not daily ones, on the hour every hour. Or the woo is me self-deprecating energy. Please stop, go to a therapist; we love you, but if I read another “I am a failure” text, I am transporting to your location and slapping you.

Healed Virgo, though? That’s the version with the humility, the work ethic, and the actual warmth that makes people fall in love with them on a press tour. That’s the Keke Palmer who radiates “everyone in this room loves me” without ever asking for it. That’s the Prince Harry who partied like it was a competitive sport and somehow also became the most relatable and loved royal in modern history. That’s the version that earns the title “Hot Girl/Hot Boy of the summer”

Another sidenote: several songs created by Virgo are perfect songs of the summer; look at MJ, Beyoncé, Ludacris, hell even Zendaya has a song I still play and bop to regularly.

So Yes. It’s Virgo.

I know somebody’s already typing “this is clearly Leo” in the comments. I respect the loyalty, truly. But Leo wants the crown. Virgo just keeps quietly winning Grammys, hosting interviews that stop the news cycle, and aging like they signed a contract with time itself, all while insisting they’re “just detail-oriented.” Aquarius, you’re top four, not top three. Pisces, sit this one out; we’ll get to you.

Virgo: ruled by Mercury, mutable enough to evolve with every era, and against every stereotype the internet has assigned you, the actual hot girl, hot boy summer of the zodiac.

*This is part of an ongoing Cosmos & Culture series working through all twelve sun signs, with rising signs and other placements to come. New essay weekly; stick around.*

If you love a Virgo you should share this essay or buy me a coffee https://ko-fi.com/chemichelletales

0

Bring Back Jerry…Well Not Quite

 The Springer Thesis: How Salacious Talk Shows Kept America Sane

Here is an unpopular opinion: we need to bring back Jerry Springer. Not the man himself, that how you end up with an undead legion of idiots. Also, God rest his soul but everything he represented. The chaos, the confrontation, the unfiltered audacity of it all. I know how that sounds. I know the reflexive response is to say that Jerry Springer was the fall of America, that Maury Povich and Sally Jesse Raphael and Jenny Jones were symptoms of everything wrong with this country. But what if we had it exactly backwards? What if those shows weren’t the disease at all what if they were the Band-Aid holding us together?

 A Brief History of the Talk Show

To understand what we lost, you have to understand what we had. I was born in 1983, which means I grew up watching this entire arc in real time. In the 1980s, the landscape was dominated by Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, and Sally Jesse Raphael. These were scandalous shows by the standards of the time, but they came wrapped in a moral framework. There was always a lesson, always a reckoning, always a sense that the host was guiding the audience somewhere meaningful. Then came the 1990s, and with them the golden age of daytime television. Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, Jenny Jones, Ricki Lake these shows stripped away the pretense and gave the audience something rawer, louder, and infinitely more watchable. People aired their most embarrassing secrets on national television. Paternity tests were revealed in front of studio audiences. Estranged relatives confronted each other under hot studio lights. It was messy and it was real and millions of people tuned in every single day.

Then something shifted. By the 2000s- 2010s, the talk show had reinvented itself around the Ellen DeGeneres model celebrity interviews, feel-good segments, viral dance moments. The audacity was gone. The mess was gone. What replaced it was relentlessly positive, carefully curated, and, if we’re being honest, a little bit boring. By the 2020s, the format had nearly collapsed entirely, replaced by a fragmented constellation of social media platforms that promised to deliver the same fix but never quite could.

 What Those Shows Actually Did

Here is what nobody wants to admit: those salacious talk shows were doing real cultural work. They served functions that we didn’t recognize as functions until they were gone.

The first and most obvious was public accountability When someone with absolutely no awareness walked onto the Jerry Springer stage convinced that their behavior was perfectly reasonable, the audience disabused them of that notion immediately. Sally Jesse Raphael, with those iconic red-framed glasses and her oversized blazer, had a gift for calling people to the carpet with a kind of no-nonsense clarity that was genuinely clarifying. There was a social check built into that format. If you were living your life sideways, the talk show was a mirror that showed you exactly how sideways it was.

The second function was subtler but just as important: those shows (Springer, Ricki, Jenny Jones) scratched an itch that nothing else can scratch. World Star tried, but it never gave a true moral resolution, just drama. The drama, through juicy and satisfying to watch in other people’s lives, while your own lives remain drama free. Having a salacious talk show with a host to contextualize the issue, the drama, and calling out the delusional b*llsh!t. There is something deep in the human brain that craves this. It’s not lowbrow. It’s not shameful. It’s just simply human need and trait. And the talk show, at its salacious peak, was the only format that delivered it reliably, consistently, and at scale.

Third, and perhaps most surprisingly, those shows snuck in genuine education. I have always given credit to Bill Nye the Science Guy and Star Trek: The Next Generation for sparking my love of science. But if I’m being honest? Maury Povich and his DNA tests deserve some of that credit too. Hearing “you are NOT the father” week after week made me genuinely curious about how DNA testing worked, how paternity could be proven, what science looked like. Furthermore, it was a stern reinforcement of why people should use birth control and protection. The number of people sleeping with the whole town always had me asking about STIs.  Ricki Lake, meanwhile, was doing something quietly radical normalizing LGBTQ+ relationships and pushing back against homophobia at a time when mainstream culture was far less willing to do so. These shows were not as dumb as they looked.

 Why Social Media Doesn’t Fill the Gap

When the talk shows disappeared, we told ourselves we had something better. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat are an entire ecosystem of user-generated drama, available twenty-four hours a day. And yet something is missing. The itch is not being scratched. Yes, we had commentators pointing out the issues with the internet drama. It’s not the same. It lacked resolution.

The resolution was mediation and explained the moral of the story. On a talk show, there was always a host a Sally Jesse, a Maury, a Ricki whose job was to hold the space, to name what was happening, to look the person with no shame dead in the eyes and says, “you cannot be serious right now.” Forcing the party to have some accountability. The question of behavior, calling out delusional logic, was built into the architecture of the format. Social media has no such architecture. Drama on TikTok is consequence-free (sidenote not anymore, people are getting divorced, fired from jobs losing sponsorships). You can post your most unhinged behavior and the algorithm will reward you for it. There is no Sally Jesse to drag you to the carpet. There is no studio audience to gasp. There is no moment where someone you respect looks at you and says, clearly and publicly, that your life is in shambles.

And because that moment no longer exists, people no longer know their lives are in shambles. That is the real crisis. It is not that people are behaving badly, people have always behaved badly. It is that the cultural mechanism that once reflected that behavior back at them, that once made them feel the weight of public judgment, has been dismantled. We thought we were evolving past it. What we were doing was removing the mirror.

The Path Forward: Healing and Drama

The answer is not simply to resurrect Jerry Springer format. That moment has passed, and honestly, some of what those shows did was genuinely harmful, it was rooted in racism, homophobia, and the exploitation of vulnerable people for ratings. We do not need to bring that back.

What we need is the next evolution of the format one that holds onto the accountability and the drama while adding something that was often missing: healing. The talk show arc was always supposed to move in this direction. You start with the spectacle “I have sixteen baby mamas and none of them know about each other” and you work your way toward the question underneath it: “why are you like this, and what would it take to be different?” The 2000s and 2010s gestured toward this transition, and hosts like Iyanla Vanzant were genuinely trying to bridge that gap.

The clearest example of what this could look like is Karamo. He saw the void and understood it. He knew that America still needed someone to look a person in the eye and say, without flinching, that their behavior was unacceptable but he also knew that the confrontation had to be paired with compassion, with curiosity, with a genuine desire to help the person find their way out. That is the model. Call out the audacity, then do the healing work. Don’t just expose the wound treat it.

 Conclusion

Let me be direct about something. America is the spoiled, disillusioned child of the world. We have convinced ourselves that we are the greatest, the smartest, the most exceptional while simultaneously being among the most overworked, the most indebted, and the most unwilling to look honestly at ourselves. We demonized the salacious talk show because we wanted to believe we were better than it. We were not. We are not. The soul of this country will not be saved by political speeches or policy debates or any of the other mechanisms we have decided are appropriately serious. It will be saved if it is saved at all by honest, unflinching, occasionally uncomfortable public reckoning. By someone on a stage asking hard questions and refusing to accept non-answers. By a format that says: you can come here with your mess, and we will not look away from it, and we will not let you look away from it either.

Bring back the salacious talk show. Bring it back smarter, bring it back kinder, bring it back with the healing built in. But bring it back. America needs the mirror. We have needed it for a long time.

If you would like more blogs like this… or I will bring Jerry Springer Drama to your door  Ko-fi.com/chemichelletales

0

Canceling Subscriptions? Blame Gas Prices!

I’ve cracked the code for escaping subscriptions. No more pretending your card was stolen. What I found is simpler, rooted in the chaos of modern life.

Gas prices.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You’re welcome. But stay with me, because this is where it gets interesting.

Now hear me out before you close this tab, because I know what you’re thinking. What does gas have to do with my Netflix? The answer: everything. In today’s world, filling a tank costs as much as a car payment, and I refuse, and I mean refuse for the folks in the back to also be paying $21.99 a month just for a giant corporation to cancel every show I actually like. Suddenly, these seemingly unrelated things are intertwined, and I have connected them.

So how does this play out in real life? You call up whatever subscription has been quietly bleeding you dry for the past eight months the gym you joined in January, the meal kit service you forgot existed, the meditation app with the audacity to charge you for stress. (I’m already stressed about living in America; your little bird isn’t helping me relax!) When customer service asks why you’re canceling, you answer with full conviction: “Gas prices.” If canceling online, when they ask for a reason, type in full caps: GAS PRICES!

Not “I don’t use it anymore.” Not “I’m trying to save money.” Gas. Prices. Deliver it with the gravity of congressional testimony. Speak it as if each word costs you.

For example, you can call and say, “Hi, I’d like to cancel my gym membership.”

Customer Service Rep with a deadpan: “Can I ask why?” You think you don’t care, but you know this game. In your best political voice: “Gas prices. I can’t afford to drive there. I’ll be walking now. My commute is my workout. The sidewalk is my treadmill. God gave me legs, lungs, and allergies to challenge my breathing.”

And if they offer you a discount? You look at that discount dead in its eyes, and you say, “I need a discount at the pump. Can you do that? No? Then we’re done here.”

The brilliance of this approach is that it’s impossible to argue against. No one can claim gas prices are low or that they don’t matter. Gas prices are universally hated, affect everyone, and serve as a neutral, non-personal explanation for cutting costs. By using them as your reason, you’re making a logical and widely relatable argument.

Best of all, this strategy isn’t limited to gym memberships. It scales beautifully.

Canceling a podcast app subscription? “I can’t tell the difference between real humans and AI anymore, and I am not financially supporting the robot takeover.” Done. Cancelled. Goodbye.

Energy bill too high? Call Netflix and tell them you’ll be sitting in the dark meditating on your life choices, and you can do that for free. For free. Netflix cannot compete with free darkness.

Planet Fitness? “I’ll be walking everywhere. Gas is six dollars a gallon. My legs work. We’re done.”

Some of you are out here concocting elaborate lies, fake moves, fake financial hardships, even fake deaths of distant relatives to cancel subscriptions. Meanwhile, a far simpler explanation is right there, loud and obvious, at $5.89 per gallon. Use it! Say it with your chest! “I cannot afford this because everything costs too much, and I am one grocery trip away from an existential crisis!”

That is a complete sentence. That is a legitimate reason. That is, frankly, a political statement.

Because here’s the thing

And I mean this sincerely amid all the chaos: if enough of us start citing gas prices every single time we cancel something, we become more than individuals; we collectively challenge how unaffordable everyday life has become. We become a movement. Imagine the “Rent Is Too Damn High” Party, updated for the 2020s: now it’s about endless subscriptions and the 13 streaming services that never seem to offer anything worth watching on a Friday night.

Americans deserve a functional transit system. The American people deserve affordable energy. We deserve, at minimum, to cancel our gym memberships without a 20-minute guilt trip from a stranger named Derek. So, next time a company asks why you’re leaving, look Derek in the eye and simply say: “Gas prices.” Derek will understand. Derek, too, drives to that underpaying job.

If you would like to donate to my gas tank you can check out this link—> ko-fi.com/chemichelletales

Until Next Time,

Che Michelle

0

30 Days of Essays: From Tire Issues to Creative Growth

damaged tire after tire explosion at high speed on highway

Coffee Chronicles: Tire Shop Edition

Side Note: I wrote this a few weeks ago. I have now come to see from the essay published Sept 1, 2026, that I will fail my own personal challenge. I am still going to post as mush as i can for the next month. So enjoy these post.

I am always having Tire issues: flat tires, blowout tires, weird lumps in tires. I will take Tire issues over car accidents every time. Normally, on Sunday my friends and I do a podcast, and then I spend the rest of the afternoon either going to work to catch up for the week or going back to my boyfriend to watch TV and eat dinner.  Today, I said, let me take care of my car, because I want to keep this for at least  15 years.  What typically would happen, I would walk to a nearby coffee shop, order a specialty latte and sandwich, and act like a writer, in one of those 90’s rom coms.  Today, I sat at the National Tire and Battery across from a cemetery, because today was Mother Nature’s Day to rain.  I am not mad about the rain; we need the rain.  Honestly, I don’t need that latte, but it would be nice. Sitting at the NTB as the technicians change my tire, and my oil was overdue. I worked on the first draft of an ok short story. I will not submit it because it’s blah, but with some revision I can see potential.

Anyway, I have been playing with this idea: publishing 30 days of essays. I know, crazy, right? I wanted to post 31 days of short stories in August, and I never made time, but if I take the rest of this month to edit, write, and create the images I want to include, I can do 30 days of posts. Now why, may you ask, 30 days of posts?  Well, I came up with three reasons.

One: I have so much finished and unfinished work just taking up space on my phone, computer, and in my head. What good are these rants, essays, stories, or poems if I keep them to myself and only share them once in a blue moon with a select group of people? The one time I shared my blog outside my close circle, a comment I got said it touched them and that it was a good blog. I can’t tell you how gassed up I was. I almost posted everything to Substack with the tagline, ” your new favorite writer. I desire to share my thoughts and life experiences with others, to inspire, to challenge, if nothing else to provide a laugh, in the absurdity of this life.

Two: Being scared has not helped anyone. Tell me one person whose being scared has helped. I am not talking about life-and-death scenarios. I mean the person with the great idea who never did it because it was too much work. The person who is afraid of what their family or friends will say, because they went after their passion and failed.  As a society, we give too much power and validation to people who never tried anything in life except breathing. My being afraid to share my work is just Wack.  I know the internet is where people like to bully people, but you know what, I can turn off my comments. How will I get better or expand if I don’t post?  I don’t want to be the person who passes away, her family finds her old notebooks and computers, and they are like, “She wrote the most beautiful stories; why did she never share them?” No, rather share them and be ridiculed, than not and be basic. Also, several astrologers on all socials have said that if you put your work out there, you will see great success. I hedge my bets on those three ladies, because they have been right on quite a few things.

Third: This reason is so juvenile, but I like it. WordPress has these two badges; one is the post 30 days in a row badge, and I am like, why the hell not.  The other is the Vampire badge, and again, I am like, do I have to write a story about vampires?  No, I just wrote After Dark. I can do both and get two badges for coming out of my comfort zone. Create a portfolio I can show a few people when I want to pursue writing opportunities.  I think once I have posted all the finished products on

Fourth, I need to learn how to use WordPress. My WordPress design is trash; I need to learn how to make it look better. Posting 30 days in a row may help me learn how to post on WordPress better.  What do I mean by better? I’ll look at the stats; this is a win-win.  I can take more WordPress classes, update the look, and work on making a presentable website that people would love to visit regularly.  

These are just the thoughts I had while waiting for my car oil change and new tire. I wanted to share them as I go on this journey of 30 posts in 30 days.  This will be interesting, and I hope to accomplish this personal journey.  Below is a link if you want to buy me a latte.

https://ko-fi.com/chemichelletales

Until Next Time,

Che Michelle

Also, I use Grammarly to clean up my writing.

0

What My Retail Job Taught Me About Finding Lost Treasures

What’s the best thing you’ve ever found randomly on the street?

Shopper finding a sparkling ring on the floor beneath a clothing rack
A shopper discovers a sparkling ring beneath a clothing rack during a busy sale.

Whenever you ask people what the best thing they’ve ever found on the ground is, they inevitably say money. It’s always money. “Oh, I found a crisp twenty in a puddle once!” Good for you, Jeff Bezos. A long time ago, I worked retail, which means the ground is less a venue for windfall cash and more an archaeological dig site of human despair. Over the years, my broom has swept up stray toy parts, pocket lint, and, on one unforgettable Saturday morning, an actual, literal intrauterine device. An IUD. Just chilling by the impulse cookie section- the irony. Was it a runaway medical anomaly? A dropped OB-GYN demo model? Did someone shed it in a fit of retail rage? Don’t ask me how I recognized it; retail transforms you into a forensic scientist whether you like it or not.

So, my broom pushed me to sweep the floor in the morning. I heard a CLANG against the store’s baseboards on a Saturday morning. Anything is better than that rogue piece of birth control was my baseline expectation. Instead, I found an absurdly demure diamond engagement ring. To understand how this happened, you first have to understand the sacred incompetence of the retail night shift. I was only in the store at 8:30 AM because my coworkers had sent a text saying, “Sorry! It was so slam-packed last night we couldn’t sweep!” Naturally, being a busybody, I checked the register logs. Their last sale was clocked at 8:01 PM. The store closed at nine. They had an entire hour of paid stillness to push a broom, stock the Snack display, and reflect on their life choices. Instead, they stood around people-watching and did the bare minimum, leaving the store looking like an abandoned storefront after Christmas.

So, I’m aggressively sweeping up their dust bunnies when the broom hit the ring, like a hockey play; I swept it into the baseboard—a real, diamond ring. I did what any reasonable, underpaid 25-year-old would do: I ran it down to a jeweler for an appraisal. The jeweler studied it, looked up at me with dead seriousness, and said, “This is exquisite. Maybe God is trying to tell you that you’re about to get married!”

Now, 25-year-old me had an immediate existential crisis over the fact that my boyfriend at the time was completely wrong for me, meaning God’s retail delivery system had severe targeting issues. Also, not that anyone asked if it slipped onto my ring finger like it had been molded in a laboratory specifically for my hand. Common sense returned and slapped me back to reality. I quickly took it off, placed it in a tiny paper envelope labeled “Customer’s Ring Found on Floor,” handed it to management, and watched it disappear into our bolted-down steel floor safe.

And there it stayed.

For five entire years!

We checked local lost-and-founds. I stalked early Craigslist boards. Silence. The ring sat in the dark behind a combination keypad, totally forgotten, until our store hired a new manager who possessed the specific, greasy energy of someone who views inventory sheets as creative writing. One day, the safe opened, the safe closed, and the diamond was… evaporated into thin air. A few weeks later, half the staff got fired over a cocktail of phantom discounts, register shorting, and the grand theft of a Diamond Ring rock (not quite; it was really people shorting the register that got them fired). The ring was gone, the statute of limitations was ticking, and we all moved on.

Until the ghost of retail past walked through the front doors. Five years after that fateful morning sweep, a woman strolled into the store. She was glowing, thriving, and happily reminiscing about our discontinued caramel nut mixes while visiting from out of state. Then she dropped the bomb: “You know, I actually lost something here right before I moved away years ago.” My broom’s hand twitched. “What did you lose?” “My engagement ring,” she sighed. “It never fit my finger right. I came in on a Thursday night to get snacks for my drive…”

A Thursday. Thursday. My brilliant, hardworking colleagues hadn’t just blown off Friday night’s cleaning duties; they hadn’t touched a broom for forty-eight straight hours. That diamond had been kicking around the carpet through two full business days of foot traffic, surviving purely because our staff was allergic to physical labor. She told me she had retraced her steps on Friday, found nothing, and realized the universe had handed her an exit ramp. Two weeks prior, her boyfriend had proposed, and she’d been harboring immediate, sickening regret from saying yes. When she confessed she lost the ring that weekend, the man utterly detonated, screaming, cursing, and revealing every toxic red flag he owned in one explosive tirade.

The dropped ring was her ticket out. She didn’t want to marry the man; she knew it wasn’t right. After that nasty argument that weekend, she decided to flee the state and start a glorious single life in Ohio. “Ohio,” my brain thought, but I let it go because she looked amazing.  She smiled and asked, “Did anyone ever end up finding it?”

I paused, looking at this radiant, completely unburdened woman who had successfully escaped a terrible engagement because of the wrong ring size.

“Oh yeah,” I told her casually. “I found it that Saturday morning. It sat in our safe for five years until a shady manager stole it and got sacked by corporate. Her face was pure, unadulterated relief. The ring had ruined a thief, dodged a toxic marriage, survived two days of retail neglect, and paid for nobody’s wedding. Sometimes the best things you find on the floor aren’t meant to be kept; they’re just dropped so someone else can finally run.

This was a dramatic retelling of me finding a ring on the floor at work. A lot of factors changed, times changed, and memories aren’t always accurate.

I am always going to ask: if you would like to help me get a right-hand diamond ringà Ko-fi.com/chemichelletales

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑