I am sitting at a coffee shop downtown watching an earthworm inch over the surface of the dry ground in the small garden outside. I want to help him by pouring some water over him and softening the earth so that he can go back below. I do not know… Read full post »

            When I read, the following: “the simple beauty of color is given by a form that dominates the darkness of matter, by the presence of an incorporeal light that is none other than reason and idea[…]that the light that shines out over matter ca… Read full post »

Today a Forbes’ article entitled, “Is Feminism Back in Fashion?” reported that Good Housekeeping Magazine recently celebrated its 125^th Anniversary by applauding “brave feminists” and throwing a fundraiser for the National Women’s History Museum. In atte… Read full post »

Anyone who’s ever driven east through North Carolina on Interstate-40 can tell you that somewhere around mile marker 330 (about thirty-five minutes east of Raleigh) a vicious stench slowly begins creeping through the ventilation system of your car. Before you know it, every square inch has been… Read full post »

(This is part of my ongoing series On Beauty. The first installment of which was “The Reflection of Narcissus.”)

            In many ways beauty is an ugly thing to write about these days. The likelihood of offending someone… Read full post »

Ferlinghetti is my favorite west coast beat (Ginsberg for the east). And this is the first poem of a collection of his recent poems that I read while sitting in the attic of city lights bookstore ;) I am neither painter nor poet, and am fully aware that I was inhabiting… Read full post »

            I arrived at the conclusion that music critics should probably refrain from using the term zeitgeist somewhere during the 2008 presidential primary season. I had supported Barack Obama from the very beginning, but something about the frequency with which/… Read full post »

I read recently about a book meant to advise Generation X on how to manage Generation Y in the workplace, entitled Not Everyone Gets a Trophy. I could not help but laugh: an image of Matt Dillon’s character in Singles wearing a suit and barking orders at subordinates while pounding a/… Read full post »

“You wanna donate some popcorn and candy to the troops?” The seventeen year-old behind the Blockbuster counter asks as she motions to the movie-theater priced snacks to the left of the register. Normally, I’m a sucker for these solicitations: $2 to homeless pets every time I buy cat… Read full post »

            I rediscovered Thompson last night. It had been nearly three years since I’d read one of the ten books with his name that grace my bookshelf with their presence.  And as I sat in bed last night reading “The Ultimate Freelancer,” la… Read full post »

The reason time seems to move by faster as you get older is because as you age each year becomes a smaller fraction of your cumulative time spent on earth. At five summer seemed endless because the season was only one-twentieth of your concept of time; when you are twenty-seven it… Read full post »

I have become a miser of time. Whenever contemplating a purchase, I always take the cost of what I am thinking about buying and divide it by my current hourly wage. So the cost of a sweater is not, say, fifty-dollars, but roughly three hours of my life, nearly half… Read full post »

Though eager to respond, I was unable to organize my thoughts around the Brit Hume/Tiger Woods ordeal. However, I came across this in my reading today and it made me think of Hume’s recent comments, and Fox News commentators in general:

“Originating in the River Nile, the crocodi… Read full post »

Behind me Salvador Dali’s The Metamorphosis of Narcissus meditates on the wall as I write this blog. The picture is one of those massive mass-produced posters in a simple black frame that my father gave to me for Christmas nine years ago when I first fell in love with Dali, and/… Read full post »

The question has intrigued me since I was eleven years-old and my older sister brought home a copy of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. When I asked her why it did, she replied that she did not know. However, it was not until after I read the/… Read full post »

I would like to propose a new rule: music critics are no longer allowed to use the term zeitgeist when discussing the cultural importance of the latest go-to band. I’ll admit it’s an exciting word, most germanisms are (e.g. blitzkrieg, Gotterdammerung, poltergeist), but overuse and/… Read full post »

I have, as mentioned in an earlier post, hated the color pink since I was a little girl.  And it was precisely this innate hatred of pink that misled me to believe during the awkward years of adolescence that I was something of a natural-born feminist. However, I recently discovered that/… Read full post »

In retrospect, that I was ill-suited for the rigors of feminist duty should have been obvious. I do not care about abortion politics. I am incapable of handing out condoms. I silently curse any man who does not open the door for me. I have, however, always possessed a strong aversion… Read full post »