Kicking the Master in the balls

May 11, 2010

Never the joiner, today I jump into something Momalon cooked up:  five for ten.  I’m quite captivated by the idea of multiple bloggers concentrating on the same theme at the same time, a deliberate attempt to heighten some sort of shared consciousness.  Here goes for “courage”: I was always the very shortest kid in my […]

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Blue Genes

May 10, 2010

Yes one can have a genetic predisposition to depression, but what might it mean that those genes developed long before our modern conceptualization of depression? I know that I seem to have a bit of that lugubrious shaman blood, that tendency toward black Russian despair and a taste for Kafka and Munch as rather funny […]

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Mothering Heights

May 9, 2010

It’s Sunday, I’m hosting Mother’s Day and I know that it’s not a good day for lengthy posts pondering mother meaning. So, I’ll just say that when it comes to mothering, my mom has to get credit as a “good enough” mother—and at 49 I take the blessings and the wounds into an embrace trusting […]

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Garden

May 8, 2010
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Learning how to see

May 7, 2010

I found myself rather choked up recently listening to an NPR profile of a new book—Dorthea Lange:  Drawing Beauty out of Desolation.  The strange thing was that I was moved by the story of an artist who made a difference for all our collective children… at the expense of her own children. Something about the […]

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Snowing the Monkey

May 6, 2010

While watching an episode of Life with the family recently we were suddenly all feeling rather sad to learn that Japanese Snow Monkeys do not share their volcanically heated natural Jacuzzi.  While the matriarchs decide who’s in and who’s out (enforced by bouncer monkeys), the outsiders are literally left out in the cold.  My older […]

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Happy Cinco de Mayo

May 5, 2010

Growing up in white Chicago, Cinco de Mayo was not even on the radar, at least not in the 60’s and 70’s.  Upon moving to LA from New York, one of the biggest trades was the loss of readily available good Chinese food in exchange for readily available good Mexican food.  And thus in LA […]

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What is up with Rumpelstiltskin?

May 4, 2010

Rumpelstiltskin is an odd and enduring tale, weird at so many levels that it has to make you wonder, “What’s up with that?” Firstly, the bragging father whose big mouth leads to his daughter being locked in a tower and forced to spin straw into gold upon threat of death if she fails.  Spineless woodcutters […]

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Practice

May 3, 2010

A recent Marketplace interview by Tess Vigeland of Matthew Syed, who wrote a book called Bounce seemed worth blogging about.  The main take-away:  perseverance is way more important than talent. Syed was the U.K.’s top-ranked table tennis player, and the fact that a number of his mates from the same street also ended up as […]

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When trees fall down

May 2, 2010

Whether or not a tree falling in a forest with no human soul to hear it makes any noise, I’m pretty sure that if that tree ends up blocking Coldwater Canyon on a beautiful Friday morning one can’t drive down Coldwater Canyon to get to work. And so it was that on Friday I was […]

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