“There are times when girls are inspired, when they want the risks to go on and on. They want to be heroines, regardless. They want to take a joke beyond where anybody has ever taken it before. To be careless, dauntless, to create havoc-that was the lost hope of girls.”

--Alice Munro, “Open Secrets”

Even though surviving for one half hour during a power outage in a house as the only adult among three under-3-year-olds wasn’t on my bucket list, it is still something I can say I have done.

It sounds worse than it actually was. There was little crying. When a thunder clap hit right over the house and the TV shut off, I let out and involuntary ( Read more... )

So the LJ prompt today is about childhood fears, which is interesting, because a memory returned to me the other night from when I was 8 or 9 years old. I was at the Mall of America with my family, and we were riding the escalator up from the 2nd floor to the 3rd (or maybe it was even higher). The escalator had glass sides, and suddenly, the ( Read more... )

I've been searching for a fairy tale I knew as a child, one that hasn't been turned into a Disney feature-length cartoon. (Yet.)

The details are a little fuzzy, but I remember a girl getting three gifts: a silver dress, a golden dress, and some kind of fur coat (bear skin? cat skin? many different furs?) Girl wears the fur coat and works as a ( Read more... )

I spent this last week (fall break for the college) supervising/participating with 10 students from the office on a service-immersion trip on the west side of Chicago, a neighborhood called East Garfield Park. We worked at different service sites in the neighborhood, such as a community garden, an HIV/AIDS food pantry and a Headstart classroom. We ( Read more... )

Today I helped run an outdoor fund raising event for a local senior center. All of our games were geared toward children.

Toward the end of the day, a father came up to make and asked me to fix a button. (Kids drew whatever they wanted on a small circle of paper, we have a machine to turn it into a pin). I did so, noticing that the man had made a ( Read more... )

It seems I have moved into Cookie Town, USA ( Read more... )

All of my pillows and blankets have been moved to Ripon, so I've been sleeping straight up on the bumpy living room couch this whole Milwaukee weekend. But I've been so busy and so thoroughly worn-out that it hasn't been a problem at all ( Read more... )

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I am giving you the best years of my life.

I did like Love in the Time of Cholera better than One Hundred Years of Solitude, but while reading both I felt like I was chained to my chair until the last page. That Colombian man can put me in a trance like no other ( Read more... )