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I Need Fifty-Nine Drinks
When I was 18 months old and napping one day, my aunt felt compelled to hold a mirror to my mouth to check my breathing and find out if I was still alive. I slept that deeply. When I was an adolescent, my sister once poured a glass of water on my face…
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The Twelve-Inch Scar
Five years ago, on January 17th, I made one of my students vomit. I hadn’t even assigned “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” either. Rather than yacking up her lunch as a reaction to Coleridge’s opium-induced writings, she barfed out of affection and empathy. See, this student came from a background so sketchy, so…
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Flaking and Cursing
Thanks to Jesus and his lot–and Lot’s Wife–I need some new swears. If it weren’t for them and all their high-fallutin’ “Biblical history,” I probably would never have heard of the Dead Sea and its abrasive salts. Which means I wouldn’t use sea salt in my homemade olive oil/cedar essence/sea salt body scrub that…
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The Night Elizabeth Taylor Didn’t Kiss Me
(Note: If you didn’t read the previous post by my guest blogger, Jim, you’d best do that before reading this one. No, seriously. Go do it. Stop skimping on every facet of your life. Just go read it, for the love of Mary Kate and Ashley. Then read this one. Still here? Kee-rist, slacker, is…
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Elizabeth Taylor’s Dress
Sometimes we see our craziness only in retrospect. Ah, hell, not sometimes. Pretty much always; I mean, if we realized how off kilter we were at the time, we’d probably tame our wilder impulses. Right, Britney? My most recent crazy decision occurred in mid-December, when I agreed to teach a class this upcoming semester that…
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W.W.O.D.?
If there is a circle of life, that circle just might be the “O” at the start of “Oprah.” It all starts and ends with Her Royal TalkNess, dunn’t it? If we need a book to read, she tells us what to buy, and invariably we’ll find ourselves gratified to have paged through yet…
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The Meathead
Although it’s not January 6th yet, I’ve had an epiphany. You see, I got to enjoy a revelation this past Christmas week. It was not a star, a star, shining in the night that drew my focus. There was no Baby Haysoos in a pile of hay what got my attention. It was not the…
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Hollyday Wishes
Wishing you and yours a dry sofa in 2008.
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Shaking the Magic Google Ball
I’ve been socked this week by a stack of research papers, student yowls, and end-of-semester freak-outs. So the writing time? Very small. You know what that means, right? Memetime, lads and lassies! Thanks, Lone Grey Squirrel, for inspiring this meme: typing my answers to the following prompts into Google Image and then choosing a photo…
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Arc of Some Skivers
In the fall of 1985, my mom dropped me off near the little town in Minnesota where I would be starting college. Fortunately, my aunt and uncle lived at the spot where she stopped the car, so it wasn’t like I was left trying to hitch a ride to campus or anything. Mom had a…
