My friend Trish is going through a tough time. This isn’t your ordinary tough time, like going through a break up or screwing up at work. Trish is going though some scary stuff, the stuff that makes people stay up late into the night worrying.

How scary, you ask? Well, at the moment, she’s homeless, jobless, and living out of her car with a child, eating one meal a day. (...

There was a time I was in a big, ugly financial funk that lasted for four god-awful years.

It was a scary time and a very lonely time.

I remember this time being extremely stressful, as I’m sure you can imagine it to be. Ironically, the most stressful part wasn’t the constant anxiety of not knowing whether we’ll have enough money to pay for bare essentials next month. It was...

A heat wave hit the Bay Area last weekend, taking the temperature as high as 107 degrees around where I live.

It was stinking hot.

I spent most of my days at nicely air conditioned coffee shops, working on my blogs and drawing. But at evenings, I had to come back to the baking heat that was trapped in my apartment. My apartment does not have air conditioning, which is usually...