Role Reversal

I performed my first sex change in elementary school. Not at the school, of course. When I was that age.

At some point during my swimming lessons, maybe when my teacher got bored with my lack of breath control or unwillingness to dive, I was set this challenge: the length of the Olympic pool. The reward for swimming the was the crown jewel of children’s toys at that moment in history: a Cabbage Patch kid.

Slow Leak/Quick End

Although you would expect a pants-on-fire liberal like me to freak out about the BP oil disaster, I found myself oddly unable to get riled up. It’s true, I often compare oil companies to drug dealers. They’re feeding evil, and not evil themselves. I prefer oil companies, since they don’t directly feed cycles of violence […]

Farmhands

Last weekend, I walked the maternal farm. My plan was to get some of its mud in my shoes. As children, we went up to the paternal farm once or twice a year. It wasn’t a working farm then. Our greatest pleasure was to tromp out and get very muddy on our way to The […]

Small Groups

I’ve had to read all this stuff about the Holocaust for some work I’m doing this summer. Spend two hours with the Final Solution, and you better be careful with yourself. To clear my head, I watched an episode of “The Wire,” in which a man was beaten to death. Oops. I had been reading […]