The superhero lurking within… Photo by Kevin Tostado. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)When I was about ten years old, my Mom laid down the law: I was old enough to sleep in my room with the door closed and the light off. I don’t know exactly why she felt compelled to declare such a policy at [...]
The fiends lurk in the most unimaginable places… Tales of vampires have been with us for thousands of years. The Babylonians had Lilith, who reputedly had a thing for sucking the blood of babies. The fiends lurk in the most unimaginable places…The Greeks had the lamaias, also with a penchant for the little ones. The [...]
No Enemy It is one of the greatest risks of living in a capitalistic society: where money is the presumed basis for happiness, each person grows up implanted with a susceptibility to marketing. Humans have been trying to sell each other on their ideas since the beginning of time, and we have made an art [...]
I found myself in a church classroom today. How and why I got there is unimportant to this story. The important thing is that I was sitting there in a little kid’s plastic chair, and I looked over at the various propaganda posted on the wall for the children to read, stumbling on the following:
“Out,out damned spot!” howls Lady Macbeth in one of the most overplayed and psychologically transparent scenes in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”. The story up to that point involves some troublesome witches, and the murder of a King that both Lady Macbeth and her husband, apparently, have some issues over. Ms. Macbeth just can’t seem to get the [...]
Today, a black cat crossed my path (I live with three, so it happens pretty often), and a murder of crows called me outside to check the landscape for trouble. The wind was blowing from the west, so I checked the clouds for signs, but they seemed to be holding steady, with only the usual [...]
The standard American parenting advice is directed toward one specific end: get your kids as independent as possible, as fast as possible. Let them cry it out, schedule their feedings, put them in preschool as soon as possible. Once in school, the rush begins to inundate them with as much “knowledge” as we possibly can, [...]
Once upon a time… This is how the stories begin, and from the first four words we know the ending we expect. No matter how old we grow, we continue to be affected by the tales of our childhood. These stories fill us with dreams and expectations which, even as we take our knocks and [...]
