Favorites

Welcome! If you would like a quick taste of my blog, check out a few of my favorite posts.

  • 47 Years of Great Rock Beatles pic2 150x150 Favorites47 Years of Great Rock: You Say It’s Your Birthday {Post and video} Hop on  a 13-minute journey through the history of rock and roll. Starting with the classic rock of the Who in 1965, you’ll hear hard rock, psychedelia, roots rock, Southern rock, funk, punk, new wave, a quick nod to disco, eighties pop, grunge, indie rock, and beyond…. (Continue reading)
  • Benign A high school English teacher once warned me and my class that we may find the existential angst in The Strangerby Albert Camus upsetting. I was intrigued. I had never received a warning about reading a book before. I still clearly remember coming to the last line (spoiler alert!): “I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.” (Continue reading)
  • Baked oatmeal snack bars 1 150x150 FavoritesHow to eat real food in 8 easy steps I took a real food mini-pledge this week, staying away from processed foods and refined grains, such as white bread, rice, and pasta. The real food pledge follows Michael Pollan’s Food Rules to not eat anything that your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food or any “edible food-like substances,” such as Twinkies. So how did I manage to eat real food this week? (Continue reading)
  • If You Give a Mom a Blog If you give a mom a blog, she’s going to want to put your picture on the Internet. Then she’ll probably get you to drink a smoothie made of spinach, and she’ll convince you to eat guacamole ice cream, too. (Continue reading)
  • 2011 03 0899 Led Zeppelin I 150x150 FavoritesIn the days of my youth… Listening to Led Zeppelin Hour after hour my teenage self stayed in my room listening to rock albums. For a large block of those years, it was Led Zeppelin on the turntable. I would put on a stack of records at bedtime, and every twenty minutes or so a fresh side would drop down, so much variety and yet always so familiar. (Continue reading)
  • Internet Exile, Part Two My students were born in 1998. They are shocked to hear about the world I grew up in, the world before the Internet, ATMs, and cell phones. (If they do picture it, it is a hazy world with horses and buggies traveling down the dusty road and overly fancy children churning butter.) I tell them that if an argument broke out around the kitchen table about a misremembered fact, we would call the public library to ask the librarian to look it up for us. (Continue reading)
  • It took me only 13 days to stop complaining for a week I survived a computer lab fiasco without complaining, only to be done in by ice cream, so I started over. And over. And over. On my first day, I felt pretty good getting through an entire school day without complaining, but I quickly discovered there are a lot of gray areas. What exactly constitutes a complaint? (Continue reading)
  • Cliff jumping rules 150x150 FavoritesJust let go: Jump off a cliff I hold onto things fiercely: movie ticket stubs, anger, prints of bad photos, grudges, logs of old exercise routines, worries, and, especially, the ground beneath my feet. I’ve been getting better at letting go, but I still catch myself hoarding, whether it’s useless things or useless feelings. For example, the moment my cutting board pushed the handmade garlic holder off the counter and I saw it shatter into pieces, I burst into tears. (Continue reading)
  • Love in a Mixtape Back in 1988, we still looked up movie show times in newspapers, we still were shocked by the Iran-Contra affair on television, and we still made mixtapes on audio cassettes. That summer, I worked part-time in a bank branch that was so slow I hardly ever had anything to do. I struck up a quick friendship with Randy, a young head teller who dressed snappily in ties with tie pins and was always clean-shaven. (Continue reading)
  • David with a tiger 150x150 FavoritesMamas, Don’t Let Your Babies in Cages with Tigers I could probably find statistics about how driving a child to the store or letting him ride his bike down the block is more dangerous than what I did, but I still feel defensive about bringing my sons into cages with tigers. Still, it was the thrill of a lifetime. (Continue reading)
  • My First (and Second) Confession There was a glitch somewhere along the way to my Confirmation, but I wasn’t about to let it keep me from finishing catechism if I could help it. As a young Catholic who usually only attended church on Christmas Eve, I hadn’t noticed that half my grade had completed their First Confession one year, the other half had done it the next, and I had somehow been left behind. (Continue reading)
  •  Sleepers 150x150 FavoritesSleepers: 10 movies you’ve never seen, but should Dancer in the Dark: Bjork was both charismatic and vulnerable as a devoted mother who is losing her sight but has to keep that fact hidden to protect her job and her son. It’s a great story that is made even greater when the characters suddenly burst into song. This movie made me ball my eyes out, too. Check out how the rhythm of the train becomes the rhythm of the song in “I’ve Seen It All.” (Continue reading)
  •  Your Momma Don’t Dance: Zumba Fail I barely got a workout as I stood in my first Zumba class stepping a little in place, baffled by what to do. Every two seconds or so we switched to a new move. My strategy of hiding in the very back of the class worked for a while until we rotated 180 degrees, and I was then looking ridiculous in the front of the class. I was utterly unable to do the moves. At one point I was supposed to be skipping, and, paralyzed in place, all I could think was “C’mon, I know how to skip.” (Continue reading)