Icky
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‘Tis the season for New Years Resolutions we’ll break by January 5th, and a season for focus on More here in America. More festivities, more holidays, bigger Christmas trees, brighter lights, more Miriah Carrey over the Target stereo so I can never escape her. It’s insurance deductible reset season, too, which means my job is…
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At my sister’s wedding in September, I had a conversation with her grandmother-in-law about squirrels. She’s from Texas. She was baffled at the boldness and number of squirrels in my parents’ backyard, chirping from the fences, playing with the bluejays and sparrows at the neighbors’ birdfeeders. Later in the season, they devoured the pumpkins my…
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I’ve never edited a long piece of writing before. By long, I mean novel length. I can easily churn out a polished 20-page research paper, a 10-page short story, flash fiction, all these smaller pieces have less space in which to pack overarching themes and character information. Every word in my smaller pieces is mindfully…
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My suburban upbringing holds a special place for hamburgers and hotdogs cooked on the barbecue, my place of birth hails the many joys of carnitas and costillas, but I don’t eat as much meat as I used to. I could lie and say it’s because I have some ethical complaint against the meat industry (I…
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A few years ago, I made the resolution that I would never wear anything I could not crash on someone’s floor in. Since then, my wardrobe has morphed into a collection of knits, worn denim, and layerable second hand pieces that I can and have taken naps in. However, I have two favorite pieces. Two…
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On the streets of Santiago, Chile in 2011, protests broke out on college campuses to demand a restructuring of higher education in Chile. These student protests faced severe police brutality, but an unexpected protector emerged from the back alleys: Negro Matapacos. A stray black dog who put himself on the front lines of protest, barking,…
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My heart lives in the shadow of the Rockies, where I was born, where I spent my childhood catching crayfish in freezing streams and scrambling over boulders that overlooked the great flat plains to the east. There is no place I am more at home than beneath the canopies of lodgepole and ponderosa forests, picking…
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Have you ever heard of James Barry? If not, you’re among the majority, despite his towering impact on the medical establishment as we know it and there is a likely reason for it: James Barry was born Margaret Anne Bulkley in 1789. At 14, he changed his entire identity, began crossdressing, and started medical school. …
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Short answer: yes. Long answer: Instinct is just pattern recognition, taking slivers of information presented to you by a third party and running them through the immense meaty computer of your brain until it prints out something that says “I’ve seen this before”. Before we settled into tidy little farms, we used it to pick…
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Gerald Pickering worked three jobs and needed a car to get to two of them. That was just how America worked, and that was why he didn’t look too close at the Nissan Altima his friend offered him when his Honda’s transmission fell out. His friend cut him a deal, $500 up front and he…
