I’ve been a Wisconsin Book Festival devotee in the last 24 hours, and it’s been great!

Well, great and unsettling. Saw Gwynne Dyer talk about Climate Wars at the Central Library last night, and all of the scenarios presented were apocalyptic. In the last five years, the militaries of most developed countries have been planning for what happens when ( Read more... )

For the last two years I have been trying to wean myself off makeup.

I knew AmeriCorps would mean cutting back on personal spending, so when I left Milwaukee, I threw out old mascara, blush and eyeliner, and never replaced those items. I also stopped using hair gel. (Hairdryers and straighteners left my life the year before. So did dye.)

That left me ( Read more... )

I’ve been having some deep thoughts, and I need to sort them out. They are not related.

( #1: The Double-Edged Sword of Widely Accepted Scientific Research )

This is what a resortation of faith is, to me:

Advocates of environmental justice are also thrilled by Jackson's emphasis on protecting vulnerable communities that lack lobbying clout. She has started by filling the EPA, long a bastion of whiteness in Washington, with young aides who represent minority groups hard hit by pollution: the nearly three- ( Read more... )

I am really obsessing over Banned Books Week this year, and I don't know why!

This map had a hand in it--and this is just the last two years. I can't believe how many books I LOVE are on this list!

(Recently) Banned Authors I Couldn't Live Without:

• Sherman Alexie
• Khaled Hosseini
• Toni Morrison
• Philip Pullman
• Sonya Sones

Obviously, I am thrilled about president-elect Obama. But some heartbreaking results have also come in.

Five states voted on propositions that would ban gay marriage yesterday. Four out of those five states passed the bans. (Failed in CT, huzzah!) One of the states to pass the ban was California, which is particularly emotional for me because I ( 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... )

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- Use a lunar calendar to track my cycle against the moon, to better understand how my body works ( Read more... )