I wish there was more about them. It is important for people to know where they are from and to learn from their elders, but sometimes we don’t have elders...

Musing about current events as they relate to dreams, a book, three movies, and a tv series on the topics of aging, work-life balance, survival, mental health and how media shapes society. Please note, this text has some spoilers.

I wrote this for a class. The assignment was to mimic a book we had to read by N. Scott Momaday called The Way to Rainy Mountain. If you can't tell, the first part is a personal recollection, the second is like a legend, and the third is written in the perception of my father. There are usually parallels in Momaday's writing that link these three together. This is all loosely based on some events and people in my family-but it is definitely fictional. This style makes it easy to reflect on and tie together death and life. In this particular story I've used the life cycles of salmon to mimic...

This is a portrait of modern society, painted as a dystopia. What happens when people aren’t happy, and why? Margaret plops a poor couple smack into what is supposedly the happiest decade of American history. Be happy! Fake it til you make it! Charmaine(the Charm) and Stan(the Bland) are perfectly malleable. I have to hand it to Atwood: writing about boring people was likely...

Steve Silberman (Rest in Power) delivers his magnum opus with Neurotribes. Temple Grandin gives us concepts that are finally taking shape many years later with The Autistic Brain. Elizabeth Moon gives us her version of the future. In 2015 I explored the hope that neurodiversity will make an appearance more often when it comes to archetypal characters. Did we achieve that in 2024?

Back in 2015 I tried to review this book and look for more meaning or likability in the main character and failed. As I have aged I realized that likability is hopefully not the intention. Tartt designed the book in what I felt was a series of emotional rifts. It drew me in as a mother. I am curious as to if people who are not parents felt parental...

We rode in the canopies of their old steel trucks to pick berries at the top of the hill, along the timberline. The smaller kids played along the creek bed in the cool alcoves between the boulders. We joined the adults. In dizzying heat, insects relentlessly buzzed our ears and bit our skin. We bought bracelets for the fair and proudly wore our new school clothes with bug bites, scratches and purple fingers.