Friday, December 11, 2009
When I was a kid we built snowmen, and the one I remember most, for some reason, is one my father helped us build during the blizzard of 1978. I’m assuming it was during this time, but maybe I’m compressing every snowstorm into the memory of the big one in 1978, when we could have [...]
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Monday, November 16, 2009
…so what seemed like fourteen kids board the bus, howling. People in the front seats scatter like there’s been a cockroach infestation. Kids take the seats, surround an older woman who scolds them. Their mother, pushing a stroller — a two seater — boards the bus behind them. – Just sit down. I don’t want [...]
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Tuesday, September 15, 2009
The things that scare me most are about routines, redundancies, traditions: waking up the same time every morning, the same bus stop and same route. There was a handsome Asian man preparing his coffee next to me, and he smelled sour. Sour doesn’t quite describe it correctly, but it was a marrying of cologne and [...]
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Saturday, August 22, 2009
Part of the enjoyment of being a teacher of English is that you will read books you never would have considered picking up in the bookstore. I had to read a series of books for an American Experience class I’m teaching, and strangely, both dealt with the African-American experience: Kindred, by Octavia Butler and Passing, [...]
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Wednesday, August 5, 2009
A man walks into the restaurant looking haggard. He’s been driving all night, and he’s exhausted – nearly drove off Interstate 90 twice on his way to Chicago. Good thing those vibrating, ribbed thingies were there on the side of the road to wake him, give him that cold shiver only terrorizing fear can give [...]
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Someone once asked me what postmodernism is, and I replied with a bumbling answer that went nowhere. At the end of my embarrassing attempt, he said, “I think I know what you mean…” which was a really nice thing to say to me, considering I couldn’t even begin to articulate what I knew was a [...]
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When McSweeney’s Publishing released Nick Hornby’s Songbook, a collection of essays written to, from, or about songs, it did something brilliant. On its website McSweeneys.net, it invited its readership to submit personal essays on songs that had a lasting effect on them. It was brilliant because it allowed individuals to actively participate in the release [...]
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At the beginning of my formal studies as a writer, I met a teacher – a college professor to be precise – who told me not to worry, that he wasn’t “one of those jealous teachers who holds his students back…” I thanked him as if it were a reflex, but about forty-seven seconds later [...]
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I’m a used book junkie, so whenever I’m in a town that has such an establishment, not overrun with shelves upon shelves of romance paperbacks, although I didn’t seem so averse to them when I was reading them aloud to two classmates in high school after computer science class, and I swear it ended up [...]
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I’ve seen Pearl Jam in concert probably ten times in my life, and each time I leave one of their shows I want to be alone and mourn over what seems to be an emptiness inside of me, as if I’ve just had to say goodbye to someone who affected my life deeply. They walk [...]
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