Ten years ago, I started this journal as a dumping ground for my reading notes. It evolved from there: I'm no longer in school, have gone through cycles of deluge and drought where writing is concerned, and now I use this LJ account primarily as a private journal ( Read more... )

[I first got to know Richard Rodriguez's writng through his latest book, Darling, a spiritual autobiography. I fell in love with the way he writes-he sculpts words. Brown is another book of his. I was captivated by this passage when I read it this morning during my commute:]

Eve's apple, or what was left of it, quickly turned brown.            ( Read more... )

Another original writing post. This one contains a bit more mature content than The Man And The Girl, perhaps a bit more social commentating as well.

~485 words, adult-ish content -- though nothing explicit and it's probably PG-13.

( She understands them. )

A girl walked down the street, passing like a racehorse the dilly-dallying pedestrians around her and ignoring the choruses of car horns and tire screeches of the traffic. She was too busy pondering the absurdity of human existence. She wondered, briefly, if God could be believed in saying that life was good. After all, he had never-according to ( Read more... )

The long road from Gaza

A Palestinian musician finds that playing with Israelis
leads across more than one border

After almost three months of intense travel and interviews, my friend Vanessa finally got her Palestinian musician article published. This piece is a unique look into the lives of asylum seekers/immigrants -- and even detainees -- who ( Read more... )

I turned my paper in! It made it into the cyberspace with a 12:18 p.m. time stamp, even though it was due at noon. But my Firefox browser literally froze at noon -- my fault really, for compiling the bibliography so last minute and the program got stalled trying to upload a PDF file and then went "boom!" But it's turned in! It's turned in ( Read more... )

So, the global Muslim reaction against the caricature depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in newspaper cartoons ( Read more... )

An excellent piece written by my friend Matt Fleischer, published in this week's LA Weekly. It's a very long piece by journalism standards-over 8,000 words. But definitely, definitely worth the read.Navahoax

Did a struggling white writer of gay erotica become one of multicultural literature's most celebrated memoirists-by passing himself off as ( Read more... )

I think I'm done with all my papers! There's still revision to do for two of them, but in terms of having something to hand in, I have it!!!

For those of you who are curious, the child sponsorship paper I wrote for my Anthropology of Intervention class is posted:
Child Development in the Context of Faith-Based Child Sponsorship OrganizationIf you ( Read more... )

Back from home, the last stretch of the semester has officially begun ( Read more... )