Last Friday, I ate lunch at the campus café. When I got home that evening, faced with a low-key weekend full of reading and classwork, I decided spontaneously that I would fast for the weekend. David fasts once per year, and does it seriously. He will fast either five or ten days, drinking some combination [...]
first fast
1
February
February
hardly education
17
January
January
Last semester, while discussing culture wars in American education, my professor told the story of her NYU professor friend who spent a few years teaching middle school social studies prior to pursuing his doctorate. During a lesson on Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a student brought up that King had been unfaithful to his wife [...]
gay love from a straight girl
12
October
October
National Coming Out Day was yesterday, Judge Virginia Phillips ruled today that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is unconstitutional, and a recent rash of publicized bullying and suicides have raised awareness about the intolerance and discrimination that are still far too prevalent and evident in our communities. The only choice in this equation is the choice [...]
Tea
5
October
October
For the past six or seven or eight months I’ve wasted many hours in an electronic debate with someone who has vastly different political views than I do. I was baited into it by his assertion that he believed what he believed because he thought it based on reason. What a joke, and what an [...]
pawn shop
28
August
August
If all it took was to raise hell and rage against darkness, we’d all be free. If there were any completely right answer, we’d have figured it out by now. Instead, the controllers play protest songs at Guantanamo at deafening levels because they can and we’re stuck pondering this paralyzing paradox, that silence is weakness [...]
mosque hysteria
27
August
August
Here is a link to the best thing I’ve yet read/heard about the mosque/Islamic center controversy, posted by a friend on Facebook. Everyone everywhere should read this, straight from the Memphis Flyer. First, a taste: “I can neither accept nor believe that the spirit and principles of our remarkable Constitution were crushed beneath the crumbling [...]
crude awakening
16
May
May
Another catastrophe hits the Gulf Coast. A veritable ecosystems-destroying, this-region-will-never-be-the-same-again, absolute disaster. And all most of us can do is watch and wait with stress in our chests, sadness in our hearts, and lots of anger. This is what collateral damage looks like. There is so much to say, so much yet to unfold, and [...]
rouge neck
17
March
March
Both sides of my family are conservative and working class. Throughout the years, many an anti-liberal, anti-intellectual, anti-Democratic-candidate email forward has landed unwelcome in my inbox. I try to keep the peace sometimes, but I resent when others feel complete freedom to make their views known to me while I’m told to just delete the [...]
another disenfranchise
10
March
March
Too often intellectualism has been treated as the mark of a schizophrenic–of someone whose thought processes are divorced from reality. But also too often have intellectuals refrained from truly translating their theory into practice, supporting the anti-intellectual’s case by default. I often express the more poetic side of my nature in my free time, but [...]
dem Saints
9
February
February
In Super Bowl XLIV, it was the first time the winning team had lost their last three regular season games. It was the first time a team kicked an onside kick prior to the 4th quarter. It was the first time a kicker made three field goals longer than 40 yards. It was only the [...]