Author: Jocelyn

  • While I Still Don’t Look Like A Model, I Am Closing in on Hairy Old Grandma

    A group of girls–some of them my “best friends”–wrote this note and gave it to me in junior high. As much as the words still make my stomach hurt (do we ever lose touch with our 11-year-old selves?), and as much as I fall to my knees and thank the sky gods for the fact…

  • Flushing the Queer Birds out of the Bushes

    She was built like a hobbit hut. Squat. Stout. Solidly constructed. Unlikely to tip over, even when besieged by orcs. Then she bent down to examine something on the path, and as the elastic waistband on her denim shorts stretched to its limits, the outline of her person both shrank and expanded. Her skin was…

  • Conscious Sedation

    The other night, as I was sipping the head off my third beer, I started to contemplate the complex relationship I have with my yoga teacher—even though she only knows me as Beefy Lady in the Colorful Headband. Although I have recently discovered subtleties in my relationship with this woman, mostly I’m afraid of her.…

  • Summery

    I haven’t been taking a break from blogging on purpose. Rather, summer hit, and life sped up to the point that there wasn’t a minute in any day to think about writing or visiting blogs. As summer winds down now, I”m left thinking of the slow, dark, cold months ahead and wondering why everyone seems…

  • The Boogie Started to Explode

    When my daughter was two, her developing speech couldn’t quite articulate the words hair clip. Instead, what came out of her mouth was hippie kip. Naturally, charmed by our creation, Byron and I started copying her words, and in no time at all, a hair fastener, in our household lexicon, was always referred to as…

  • End O’ Semester and Dontists

    The end of the semester always lands with a crash–a head-snapping bump at the very least–and never moreso than when final exam week is topped off with a root canal. As I sat in the endodontist’s office this past Friday morning, nervously fidgeting in the exam room, one of the office workers decided to come…

  • She Wouldn’t Be The First Student To Complete Her Work While “Altered”

    Stop. Count to ten. Think before replying.   That old chestnut is actually fairly hard to apply in a classroom environment–where everyone’s eyes look expectantly at the teacher, where the teacher is supposed to be the font of information, where the energy is alive, where the teacher needs to carry the momentum with snappy decision-making.…

  • There Is Gentle

    When I was pregnant the second time, I harbored a fear. I was afraid that the baby inside me would be a boy. I’d spent the previous couple of years hanging out with a sweet, calm, kind little girl. I liked the little girl. When I’d take her places, like to the library, we’d sit together…

  • Wazzat?

    I recently had an email exchange with a college friend who reads this blog. The exchange started when she messaged to josh me, semi-accusingly, about the point in my previous post where I mentioned road tripping to The Alamo in Texas–yet I had not called or visited her (she lives in Austin, TX), and how…

  • Narrative

    At my college, we offer regular, semester-length classes (sixteen weeks) along with a different option: the eight-week class. The eight-week option was created to help our students pack as much learnin’ as possible into the shortest reasonable time frame. One would be justified in having reservations about the eight-week classes, as our students often have…