Category: self-reliance

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.”  […]

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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 […]

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Mary, Martha, and cheapskate intellectualism: the New Year’s organizing dilemma.

Every year, fresh from days away at my family home where there are friendly differences about — shall we say — organizing styles, I return to my own little house and see the place with fresh eyes.  Somehow, as good as I usually am about filing and purging, the place just looks full.  The line […]

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Learning to submit?: Economies of womanhood, personhood, and love.

I believe that what rules us is less the material world of goods and services than the immaterial one of whims, assumptions, delusions, and lies; that only by studying this world can we hope to shape how it shapes us; that only by attempting to understand what used to be called, in a less embarrassed […]

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Gardening in reality.

“A garden, you know, is a very usual refuge of a disappointed politician.” — Alexander Hamilton, 1802 (qtd. in NY Times, 9/15/11) As a society, we’ve got a reality problem.  A know-nothing right-wing anarchism designed to starve government to death while enriching the anarchists’ own careers is being accorded a respectability and freedom of movement […]

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