I’ve been living in my current apartment for almost ten months, but only recently did I learn that the monstrous church kitty-corner to my front stoop is abandoned. I know what you’re thinking, and I agree: I, too, had no idea I was this interesting.
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Metaphori-Weekly! – People Are Like Pencils
People Are Like Pencils
People are like pencils; honed and whole at first, with a core of potential words hidden beneath a sheath of laminate, a hard-gloss finish in any and every color. People are like pencils; sharpened to a lethal point in a moment of whirring tumult, a point that might prick blood in the half-thought of haste, a point that cuts across yawns of ambiguous blankness in precise, stringent lines that structure and rectify, cross-out and destroy. People are like pencils; their words might be erased, but not the actual imprints they etch on the surfaces they touch; when their sentences are gone, the ghosts of their sentiments are left behind as pocks and scars and smudges and particles of dust.
Community Service
The walls of the school enclose a large, overgrown courtyard choked with ivies and brambles. A glossy emerald carpet of pachysandra washes over the stone tiles on one end, like a receding tide, and a few students are pulling at it with rakes and sheers.
“We’re not supposed to go past this,” says one student to me as I walk over to supervise the community service. ‘Supervise’ is my assignment, but really I am just curious, and I’d sooner like to find myself sitting in the sun with my book open in my lap. The student goes on, “Because there’s poison ivy.”
“I’m immune to poison ivy,” I tell them.
Classroom Culture, Authority, and Data’s Use in Defiant Youth
This upcoming week I have an interview at this awesome company up in Providence, that uses design-thinking to innovate business modeling. At least that’s my interpretation of it. I’ve looked at a bunch of firms that do this sort of work but I’m incredibly drawn to this one in particular, and it’s because of their emphasis on social impact and transformative agency.
And–best of all–I’d be focusing on education!
Read moreClassroom Culture, Authority, and Data’s Use in Defiant Youth
Educating the Ignorant on the Majesty of Ursula, Sea Witch and Gay Icon
Growing up, I thought Disney’s The Little Mermaid was about Ursula. I thought the movie, though oddly focused on that emaciated red-headed hoarder*, was actually a film about a business-savvy octopus lady’s dream of political conquest, and the unfair regulations she was forced to overcome. **
*(This isn’t thin shaming so much as it is a response to Ariel’s most famous frame, in which she is grotesquely disproportionate. This is compared to the rest of the movie, where the animators did not render her a bobble head).
Read moreEducating the Ignorant on the Majesty of Ursula, Sea Witch and Gay Icon
April is LGBT Month! #LGBTApril
Laura (of Laura Plus Books) and Cayce (of Fighting Dreamer) are doing this great thing called LGBT Month this April (#LGBTApril), and I’m participating!
I mean, I guess I’m always participating, because every month is LGBT Month for me, but it’s more fun to do these sort of things when people are making cute banners for you, and when you’ve got a tribe bristling with restless inspiration and do-good vibes.
The Importance of Gay Heroes That Don’t Die
There are many tropes. Busty, blonde damsels. Brittle, brunette mistresses. Feisty, red-headed warriors. Alternatively: White-Male-Hero-With-Somnolent-Eyes-Yet-Aerodynamic-Cheek-Bones vs. Anything. Or the ever-plotless vengeance against a villain with no real motivation for villainy save an inscrutable need to inconvenience Our Hero. We know these tropes well. They’re practically family. If one came to your door and asked to come in, you might check for a judicious nod from your mother, but you’d open that door.
Ryan vs. New York City: A Story of Trash, Bingo, and Self-Assuredness
(No, I’m not in the photo. I’m taking the photo. Stop creepin’)
I spent the past few days in New York and I wasn’t in complete agony!
Now, before I go further, I want to reject the notion that I blindly despise NYC because I went to school in Boston. Honestly, I’m shocked you’d even go and make that assumption. It really makes me questions how comfortable I am talking with you. What other prejudices are you projecting onto me? You, my reader, are probably a very paranoid and miserable person.
Read moreRyan vs. New York City: A Story of Trash, Bingo, and Self-Assuredness
Chocolate Therapy
So a few nights ago I was working at the ice cream shop. A grandmother brought in her two little girls, and the older one ordered the flavor called Chocolate Therapy. Seeing this, the younger one also ordered Chocolate Therapy, to which the grandmother (who had the best, bright red blow-out since David Bowie), gasped and said, “Why, I didn’t know you were a chocolate therapy girl!” The little sister seemed to read a pejorative meaning into the exclamation (shame on you grandma!) and so, thinking I’d be helping, I whispered huskily over the counter, “I, too, am a chocolate therapy girl.”