Ordinary Canary

Last night I dreamed of knitting as a type of personal hell; the stitch was stockinette, which references a project I’ve been working on that makes me dislike knitting.  Stockinette, stockinette, rows and rows of endless, never changing stockinette.
But stockinette is the perfect stitch for dreams.  In dreams, your brain often goes over the same [...]

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An article on lesbian separatist communities that I found interesting.
I’ve been thinking a lot about communities of women (of all sexual orientations) because of the novel I’m reading, The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett. It is really, really good. It’s about a home for unwed mothers run by the Catholic church [...]

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I’ve been back from Europe since Saturday and I must admit I’m still in a state of cultural confusion.  I have three currencies in my wallet, the euro, the pound and the dollar.  I have stamps from two countries, cell phones from two countries, plugs that work here but not there, plugs that work there [...]

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A very sad thing happened on Saturday. Tai Lam, a 14 year old boy and a student of the school for the gifted in math and sciences Montgomery Blair, was shot down by a gunman who appears to have just been looking for a fight.
This story affected me pretty profoundly - I actually burst [...]

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Okay, I’m done with the politics. Now back to me, me, me.
One of the problems with being in a happy relationship, having finally bought my house that I’ve dreamed of and having landed a great job is…I’m so happy that I celebrate by shoveling food in my mouth. Good food. Really, really [...]

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the process of learning.  Why?
Well, Tangrams.  You remember those?  You get a bunch of geometric shapes made of plastic and a board with a pattern darkened on it.  You then have to fit the geometric shapes into the pattern.  There’s a timer.  I remember being handed these when [...]

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Growing up, I thought of feminism as a thing of a past - something that we no longer needed now that we had formed an equal society. I was envious of women who had marched for the ERA and broken down barriers - proud of women like my mother, who infiltrated the all-male track [...]

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Aside from my current insomnia, it was another rather lovely weekend.
My house is well under way in being painted, but I still had to run around to hardware stores to pick up a few last colors. Damn my training in color theory that makes it impossible to paint everything one color because the [...]

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September has arrived again, though this is the first time that I’m 28 years old for it.  It is the second time that it’s shown up and I’ve had a college degree, which has lead to no small amount of duress.  It took me so long to get my degree (six years) that after I [...]

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I watched Devil With a Blue Dress On last night, having determined that the purpose of cable TV and a DVR is recording movies that I never got to see. The movie begins with the narrator discussing how important owning his own home is, especially with the context of his being an African-American man [...]

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