Touching through the glass: animals, people, reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fbahS7VSFs&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3] Young parents laugh nervously as they film their child, whom they have placed up against the glass of a lioness’s cage in a zoo. Behind the glass, the lioness is deadly serious: she scratches and bites the barrier separating her from one good bite of food. Incredibly, the father giggles, “Say hi, kitty, kitty.” […]

April 22, 2012

Afoot in the world.

Back on the bike for a big day of riding today, the first in too long a time, under a sky so blue it hurt to look at it. This was the kind of sunny, windy April day that has you taking your fleece jacket off, then putting it on again, over and over. On […]

April 12, 2012

A general Cheapskate update.

Ah, loyal readers, where to begin? So much has been happening offscreen lately. Bidding gleeful goodbyes to Rick “Torquemada” Santorum (as Bob has dubbed him.) Gearing up for some local action on May 5 (stay tuned.) Ending a Lenten Facebook fast with the desire — which I don’t see changing any time soon — to […]

April 11, 2012

A world safe for children — really.

In Florida, an unarmed boy with dark brown skin, walking to a convenience store for some candy, is shot by a jittery, self-styled “neighborhood watch” vigilante. The reasoning of the white shooter and his supporters — who erupt all over the Internet and the political sphere, with astonishing malice and vindictiveness — is dismally transparent. […]

March 21, 2012

The earth’s thin skin.

This season of hesitant and lovely changes began with a scrim of ash that colors the skin underneath, that asks us to look and wait in the times of boredom and worry and anomie, because something more is coming. It always moves me at Lent, the sober lines of people moving from the altar back […]

February 26, 2012

The Lenten closet.

Yesterday I went to Minneapolis to buy some sorely needed new clothes. Just a few good pieces that I was lucky enough to find on sale. This afternoon — energized by what Marilynne Robinson in Housekeeping called the “swift, watery wind” blowing all around my neighborhood, and feeling it disarranging me in a good way, […]

February 17, 2012

Whitney Houston and the women-walls.

On Facebook and even email, this picture meets me at every turn, looming, vaguely Inquisitorial. You want to explain to us why you *need* birth control, young lady? Depressed by the image and its context — and by work and other First World Problems, despite even-more-stellar-than-usual moments of conversation with students — I turned to […]

February 12, 2012

A vermicular update — and some home composting lessons.

A couple of posts ago, you read about my new experiment in home vermicomposting. But since then I’ve learned there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Basically, I now wish I’d started with one of these pictured here — a Worm Factory 360 — from the beginning rather than […]

February 4, 2012

“No pleasure but meanness.”

Near the end of Flannery O’Connor’s classic short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” an old woman gets drawn into bargaining for her life with a killer. The Misfit, as he’s known, is escaped from prison and rampaging, wounded, through the world. In his own mind, he’s been wounded by God: he can’t […]

January 29, 2012

Animals in heaven: an addition.

If you liked my Annie-the-cat post, you will appreciate this cartoon from a friend’s Facebook wall, by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti. Of course the dog would recognize his little boy.

Amy E. Weldon

Writer. Teacher. Seeker.

The Cheapskate Intellectual