You know those nights when you can’t sleep? You’re soooooooooooooo tired, but you hit the lights, crawl under the comforter, settle in just so with your pillows scrunched and your toes dangling off the edge of the bed – exactly as you like it. You shut your eyes. You think good thoughts. You wait. And […]
To Be Or Not To Be: Choosing Your Child By Gender
How could I not be a little horrified when I read this headline? Couple aborts twin boys because they want a girl using IVF. When it comes to the art of headline writing, I’d say that qualifies as a grabber. It caught my attention, provoked my ire, and brought me to this article that appeared […]
Argyles
The clothes make the teen (man) There was the suspender phase. And the bow-tie phase. And the tie-dye phase (which has yet to end). Ripped jeans? Ever in fashion. Likewise, the torn and worn leather jacket. Apparently, one has moved on to a taste for preppy classics: neat sweaters (to my relief) and strangely, argyle […]
Giving Shape to Invisibility
Giving shape to invisibility. I plucked those evocative words from a writer I’ve recently discovered, Wolf Pascoe at Just Add Father, and the reference comes from this: When I was eight, my father died suddenly. My mother never remarried. As a result, a good part of my life has been defined by what was missing. […]
Essentials: Anything Goes in the Name of Art?
Health + Family + Relationship + Work. Essential to a good life, don’t you think? Of course, you may wish to rearrange the sequence to reflect your circumstances or values. Some of you may add in “faith” or spiritual inclination. As for myself, I would include a roof overhead and food on the table, without […]
Letters, Writ Small, for Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute was one of the initiators of the nouveaux romans genre of novel-writing, a style that shuns the use of traditional narrative techniques, such as plot structure, characters, and setting. Instead, Sarraute and other practitioners of the “new novel” focus on presenting precise, objective narratives that are often episodic in nature and call upon […]
Three C’s: Cruel, Callous, Counterproductive
Anyone who has spent time participating in social media has seen their share of bad behavior: name-calling, meanness, and of course there’s spam. Anyone who has a blog – or reads them – has waded through comment sections, tiptoeing around the spurious and vicious remarks, trying to get to the heart of the matter. We […]
Gender Roles: Virile Verbs, Apathetic Adverbs, Nouns in the Nunnery
Musing on gender stereotypes, parts of speech, and love.
Dental Dam(n) and Cool Whip
Your eyelids are swollen shut and you’re trying to pry them open and feeling for your glasses which, oddly, aren’t in the place where you put them every damn night but somehow they’ve gone AWOL when you’re running late and you can’t see anyway because (a) you can’t find your glasses and (b) your eyelids […]
Fiction
Here are the moments as I live them: Sheets of freezing rain are battering the windows. The chill is bone numbing and I cannot find its source. The thermostat is mysteriously broken again and I flick it, to no avail. As for the noises I was hearing, for now, they’ve stilled. It’s not yet daybreak, […]