At 29, I don’t know that I’m really prepared to contemplate my own mortality. But two weeks ago, that’s exactly what I was confronted with, as I anxiously awaited test results that could have detected cancer in my bloodstream. For a week, I lost sleep and ate little, as my mind was dominated by images [...]
Category Archives: The World According to Nouns
Check Your Head, and Your Blood
07-Apr-06January 2, 2001
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I’ve Been Here Before
30-Jan-06
It was the morning that I was supposed to wake you up with kisses. I’d slept so little the night before that when the sun rose, it hardly felt like morning at all. We laid there together, clutching one another for what was possibly the last time, stifling the tears that seemed inevitable. We were [...]
Newspeak around the Watercooler
20-Dec-05Do you wear a lot of hats at your job? Is there a lot on your plate? Are you encouraged to think outside of the box? If you answered yes to any of these questions, I bet you hate your job. Okay, maybe you don’t hate your job. But let’s face it: the lexicon of [...]
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being
02-Nov-05As a white male growing up in the Midwestern United States, I can safely say that I have no idea what it’s like to be oppressed. The academic shackles that kept me from breaking free of high school somehow fail to compare to the Jews’ plight in Egypt, and the closest thing to true liberation [...]
Goodbye
24-May-05Randolph Pederson, 1913-2005 The last time I saw him was in 2003, when my then-girlfriend Fran and I ventured to the northern edge of the Great Plains for a family reunion celebrating his 90th birthday. He was frail by then, but it was clear that he’d kept his wits about him. After spending the afternoon [...]