Learning to live with not meeting other people's expectations has been extremely freeing and is the only gift I wish to pass on to any future offspring.

We are being conditioned, as a population, to never wait, to never delay our gratification, to accept thoughtless, constant consumption as the new norm. But how we think about consumption and willpower carry enormous implications for the environment and the culture of society as a whole.

Artists' obsessions with technology are not new, but in the late aughts, the work tended to focus on the possibility of the medium, treating technology like a new tool rather than a sociopolitical framework.

The video-sharing app Vine was the first place I got a glimpse of cultures beyond my own, including those of the Middle East. I was able to see how some women there wanted us to see them: prospering, aware.

Social media is my portal into the rest of the world - my periscope into the communities next to my community, into how the rest of the world thinks and feels.

SoundCloud took a community-first approach to building its business, prioritizing finding artists to post on its service over making deals with music labels to license their music, the approach taken by Spotify.

For all teenagers, the Internet offers a periscope to the outside world, but it's particularly important for students who are unable to find themselves represented and understood in their immediate surroundings.

I like to dim the lights and talk about the ghosts I've known and invite other people to tell me their stories.

When 'Drag Race' first began, it seemed like a fun window into an underground culture, but over the nine years it has aired, the show has evolved to reflect America's changing relationship to queer rights and acceptance.

When I visited my family in Virginia, I tracked down my seventh-grade best friend and sat in TGI Fridays near a mall for hours, laughing while her daughter took insane-looking selfies on my phone.

The Internet is pushing us - in good ways and in bad - to realize that the official version of events shouldn't always be trusted or accepted without question.

Established technology companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google have expanded their reach and influence throughout the world. And while many countries have pushed back against that spread, our government has essentially left them alone.

Producing zines can offer an unexpected respite from the scrutiny on the Internet, which can be as oppressive as it is liberating.

Familiarize yourself with the resources at hand to combat online bullying, and report offenders as often as you need to. Don't hesitate to report and block.

I'm not ashamed to admit that for many years, most of my fitness information came from a VHS series by MTV called ''The Grind Workout.''

For all its power as a protest medium, black Twitter serves a great many users as a virtual place to just hang out.

It's becoming much more common to see yoga studios offer classes aimed exclusively at people of color who are searching for ways to cope with racism and fears around police brutality.

As a lonely teenager growing up in Virginia, I fed off any pop culture that could show me different ways of being from what I saw on 'The Cosby Show' reruns or read about in an Ann M. Martin book.

For many years, taking care of myself consisted of showering and showing up to work on time. Sleeping and eating were inconveniences at best.

Twitter, it can be said, completely changed the way activism is done, who can participate, and even how we define it.

As Twitter allows you to curate who shows up in your stream - you only see the people you follow or seek out, and those they interact with - users can create whatever world of people they want to be a part of.

There is much about the shared terrain of being a black person in the United States that is not seen on small or silver screens or in museums or best-selling books, and much of what gets ignored in the mainstream thrives, and is celebrated, on Twitter.

I've long been interested in how technology mediates desire and the way that our phones, an extension of ourselves, foster intimate interactions that feel so personal and deep, despite being relayed through a machine.

I've endured humiliating experiences trying to get a cab in the various cities I've visited and lived in. Available taxis - as indicated by their roof lights - locked their doors with embarrassingly loud clicks as I approached. Or they've just ignored my hail altogether.

There's a lot of paranormal activity in my family. Whether it is more than most other families is hard to say, but we seem to have more than most.

Over the years, I've come to realize that sometimes a ghost isn't always a ghost. Sometimes, telling a ghost story is a way to talk about something else present in the air, taking up space beside you. It can also be a manifestation of intuition, or something you've known in your bones but haven't yet been able to accept.

The first ghost story I ever heard was from my mother.

I'm a white girl and not a white girl, identified by other people as black and not black for as long as I can remember - which, in mixed-people speak, means biracial.

The argument has been made that smart women on screen are already enough of a minority to make up for the lack of women of color. Nope. Not good enough.

TV shows and movies are a rare form of atemporality, and in an ever-changing, always-on world, spoilers feel irrefutable - sheer access to them gives the illusion of control.

The celebrated film critic Pauline Kael once wrote that movies function as escape pods, portals to parallel universes that can be radically different from emotional norms and societal conditioning of our own. What she meant was they parceled out freedom, allowing viewers to lose their selves in an effort to find greater connection to the self.

'Drag Race' has taught me a lot about how to form community, to take myself less seriously and lose some ego.

In person, RuPaul is warm, funny, personable - someone who thoroughly enjoys life.

I came to 'RuPaul's Drag Race' late: I didn't get into the show until its fourth or fifth season.

Drag has been featured in popular culture for decades. Movies like 'Kinky Boots,' 'Tootsie,' 'The Birdcage' - even 'Mrs. Doubtfire' - have showcased men, some gay, some not, who dress and perform as women.

Nonviolent, visual protests have a long history of forming images that can quickly go viral and set a powerful tone for a moment.

In America, mixed-race identity tends to invite both curiosity and suspicion, largely because few have found a way to interrogate it without centering whiteness as the scale by which to evaluate blackness.

The most moving parts of 'Real American' come when Lythcott-Haims stares unflinchingly at her own self-loathing, writing about the racist encounters of her childhood that convinced her from a young age that there was something inherently wrong with being black.

We may have a tacit understanding of how our solar system works, but watching the sun disappear behind the moon reminds us of the vastness of space and the enduring mysteries of the universe we inhabit.

Generally speaking, the business of music streaming is treacherous at best: Consumers don't seem to want to pay big money for access to digital music services, so companies must keep the fees low.

Spotify, Tidal, and even YouTube, to a degree, are vast and rich troves of music, but they primarily function as search engines organized by algorithms. You typically have to know what you're looking for in order to find it.

As digital culture becomes more tied to the success of the platforms where it flourishes, there is always a risk of it disappearing forever.

It took me years to find a program that kept me in shape: Gyms felt intimidating, and women's magazines seemed tailored for toning the bodies of already trim white women.

I experimented with every kind of class possible - yoga, spin, Pilates, rowing - but it was all haphazard, cobbled together by trial and error.

If anything, Twitter helps me read about perspectives outside of mainstream media and learn about new authors, artists, and ideas that I don't always get exposed to in my regular media diet.

Luckily, my only responsibility for 'Still Processing' is to show up and talk.

I'm partial to a Muji recycled-paper sketch book and a Sharpie ultrafine marker.

A governing ethos of the Internet has been that whatever flows through it - information, ideas - is up for grabs.

The Internet has become the go-to place to toss out ideas in the hope that they could lead to a job, but it has also become the place where people go to find the best ideas, creating a lopsided dynamic that tends to benefit people in power.

Online, there is an irresistible social currency to being a user who has thousands of followers, who starts memes, who comes up with an idea that is turned into a movie. But I wonder how comfortable we should be with this arrangement.