I can’t even use it in a sentence. When I open my mouth, I can form the shape and blow a little air through — "Hhhhhhhhh" — but I can’t add a hard consonant without gagging. It all started in 2012. I left my part-time teaching seasonal labor edu-temp position to build...

Q: What walks on four legs at dawn, two legs at noon, and three legs at sunset? A: A human being, crawling at birth, standing at midlife, hobbling on a cane as life ends. Spoiler alert: This is the riddle of the Sphinx. When he solved it, Oedipus was saved from being...

And the thing I always thought, through this whole process, was that I'm about as resourceful and well-positioned as a person could be to get help and information from the system. What would it be like for someone who is not good at online research, or at reading...

Sometimes in the middle of appreciating another person's skills, I suddenly step through the looking glass and see instead what skills I lack. If a friend of mine becomes a movie director, or gets a book of poems published, or launches a high-paying online business,...

Today is Mother's Day. I have a mother, and I will be calling her, don't you worry. Since I am also a mother myself, I will be celebrating the way I used to dream about when my teenagers were mere ankle-biters: A day to myself. Last year, as I recall, it was hard to...

It doesn't come up in the promotional materials for The Clearwater School, but Clearwater is a good place for boys who cry. At other schools, certainly the progressive, public alternative schools I attended, boys who cried were punished for being wimps. Yesterday, at...

I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all...

Cutting the umbilical cord swiftly, it turns out, is not necessary for baby health, and it may deprive the baby of valuable blood supply. I knew as soon as my baby boy was from my womb untimely ripp’d (“untimely” in the sense of “after 40+ hours of labor”) that the...

56 days in a row, 56 blog posts. I'm tired and I'm torn between completely self-excavating and hiding in a cave. It's time for privacy, and recharging. Time for a relaxed and undraining day. Vacation next week, and still I'll be posting every day. Today I forgive...

One thing made from many. The treat is marzipan, selected for the smooth patience it takes to turn from nasty crumb into moist and cloying sweetmeat. The magical tease of colors, salaciously sensual shapes. A salacious bill-shaped tongue licks the surface of the...