I ordinarily avoid Internet memes like the plague, but I’ve finally succumbed to this one-if not for its popularity, then perhaps the challenge of reducing my history, circumstances, and goals to 25 sound bites. Read on at your own risk, and if you’re surprised or shocked by any of the following, please don’t be offended or worry too much. You are ( Read more... )

It may seem presumptuous, even harsh or dismissive, to say that partially democratizing schools is impossible. How can any effort to give students a greater voice in their education be a bad thing? The problem is, though, democracy is not modular-it’s either/or, on or off, all or nothing. “Partially democratic” makes about as much sense as “ ( Read more... )

a writing prompt that came out of my class last week. Take any of the following and spend 15-20 minutes writing an article for it. (I wrote these particular headlines, but feel free to come up with your own.)

• New video game ratings unveiled
• Study links low IQs, political success
• Landfill-to-playground movement gains in popularity
• Supreme Court upholds ( Read more... )

I just discovered that not only did Stephen Colbert go to Northwestern, but his tenure and mine there overlapped by a couple of years. For those of you baseball fans out there, Yankees manager Joe Girardi was a Northwestern senior when I was a freshman; and for you pop culture fans, David Schwimmer of Friends fame was yet another anonymous cohort ( Read more... )

a.k.a., getting a head start on New Year's resolutions. These are things I have decided* I am no longer willing to postpone or otherwise do without.

• health insurance
• seeing my nieces and nephews a minimum of three weeks/year
• going to concerts and plays regularly
• never to have to work shit jobs in order to pay the bills
• reliable car (could ( Read more... )

(See my previous post for a spot of context. This particular piece came from the prompt "Someone has a dream, then wakes up to find their dream coming true in an odd way." I blame this on my recently reading some works by Haruki Murakami ( Read more... )

(preface: the following post or two came out of writing prompts I gave my Creative Writing class at school. For the uninitiated, these 15-20 minute writings start with some generic topic like, in this case, "a brush with the law." This and the next/preceding exercise I may or may not want to develop, polish and/or extend; your feedback in this ( Read more... )

While I'm pretty sure I need to at least live in a town with a Sudbury school, and need a choir at least as good as the one I'm in here in Colorado...I often wonder how non-negotiable these things are. As the politicians say, what if everything were on the table ( Read more... )

Intimations of Mortality

(note: This is a follow-up to the two poems I posted earlier today...though in true blog fashion, it appears before the entry to which it responds.)

I've always resented the "starving children in China" argument: the idea that because others are less fortunate, my own unhappiness is somehow less valid. Mostly it's annoying ( Read more... )

I just found out a high-school friend of mine has Huntington's. So naturally, I turn to poetry...

Spring and Fall, to a Young Child
Margaret, are you grieving ( Read more... )