The Lateral Freelancer: How to Make a Living Doing a Little Bit of Everything

For most of the past five years, I was chronically under-employed. About eight months ago, I made a few changes in my approach to finding work that completely altered my job prospects. I went from earning almost nothing to making several thousand per month from half a dozen different freelance opportunities.  For the first time, I was turning down gigs because I didn't have time to accept them all....

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What Are Your Boundaries?: A Burning Man Travelogue

At the end of August, I found myself in a car with three strangers, hurtling non-stop across the country, from Philadelphia to Monterey, and then to the Burning Man Festival outside Reno, NV.  I'd been wanting to go to Burning Man for years, but had always put it off.  This year, finally, I'd bought a ticket.  I considered there to be a small, though not unreasonable, possibility that I might not survive the trip....

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Polyamory: Or, Why Can't We Go On As Three?

A few years ago, I wrote a short story in which a same-sex couple visits an “omni” bar to seek out a female to complete their triad.  In their world, the prevailing custom is for three-way marriages, and those who insist on traditional partnerships are referred to disparagingly as “monosexuals”.  I hadn’t researched the word “polyamory,” and I didn’t know how many people actually practiced it in the real world.  I thought maybe a few hippies lived in triads somewhere in Northern California, and that was all....

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