Archive for January 2015
Slate might actually be stealing my ideas. Not really, but you have to admit that it’s getting a little suspicious.
About two weeks ago, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post accusing Slate of stealing my ideas. On the same day, Slate published pieces defending skipping and arguing that climate change skeptics can no longer use the word skeptic when describing themselves because it’s simply not true. I had previously published blog posts that were eerily similar.…
Read MoreLove my readers
A reader from overseas sent me this collage my the covers of Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, including two that I had never seen before.
Read MoreThe mindset of the person who affixes those stick figure family decals to the rear window of their car mystifies me.
I like to imagine the decision making process that goes on in someone’s mind when they make a choice that I think is fairly stupid. Take those stick figure decals that you see in the rear windows of cars the serve as a representation of a family’s size and composition. Stupid. Right? Of course they…
Read MoreMy aunts and uncles were once young and strong and infinite. This is how I try to remember them even when the shadows of my ongoing existential crisis creep in.
I’ve been thinking about my grandparents a lot lately. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the families that they raised and what life must’ve been like back then. In the not-so-old days. I have an interesting family dynamic: My mother married my father.My mother’s brother married my father’s sister. Two families more closely intertwined by marriage…
Read MoreThis is how I survive meetings.
When I am forced to suffer through an agonizing meeting or a pedantic training session (of which almost all are), I stare at photographs like this to prevent my soul from being thoroughly crushed. Photos like this are like a tiny light in a universe of infinite black. They serve as a reminder that the…
Read MoreMy friends are incredibly odd. Complete outliers. I couldn’t be more happy.
It occurs to me that all of my closest friends are exceptionally non-materialistic. Not a single designer anything in the bunch. Not one name brand plastered on anything that they wear or carry. Nondescript clothing absent of labels or markers of any kind. And with the exception of a 1960’s Corvette – which my friend…
Read MoreHow I teach storytelling
I did an interview with Jim Levulis of WAMC public radio on storytelling, and specifically, the teaching of storytelling. If you’re interested, you can listen here.
Read MoreI think my wife married me to compensate for her lack of a sense of direction.
I’ve always been able to navigate well without a map. Years ago, in a time before GPS, I brought Elysha – who was still my girlfriend – to Rhode Island to visit my mother. When we arrived at my mother’s building, I suddenly remembered that she had moved across town just a week before. In…
Read MoreThe best moment that I have ever spent at a football game. Maybe one of the best moments of my life. And it happened during a timeout.
My love of the New England Patriots doesn’t make a lot of sense. A collection of men who I have never met take the field to play a game that I have never played professionally, and even though I have no tangible connection to a single person associated with the Patriots organization, my heart hangs…
Read MoreWhen do you allow your child to quit an activity? Also, entering into contractual agreements with your child is insane.
In the Washington Post, Katherine Reynolds Lewis writes about when it’s acceptable to let your child quit an activity and how do you handle the anger that children express when forced to continue with something that they don’t like. She and her his husband have used a strategy that I will call contractual commitment: We…
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