Brave on paper
We’re all brave somewhere. I’m brave on paper. A woman friend of mine recently confronted a man on an airplane. This seems equal parts courageous and unadvisable. You’re already sardined into the equivalent of a flying Dairy Whip canister with nothing between one another but flimsy pieces of plastic and a bag containing six off-brand […]
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Even though I didn’t know how to play any type of jazz instrument, when I was a junior in high school I decided I was going to join jazz band. Ours was a fairly typical suburban high school arts program: understaffed, under appreciated, underfunded. The light board for our school’s auditorium was run by a […]
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A young woman sat at the end of long wooden community table in the café, which was empty except for her. Sunlight poured through the large window behind her, spilling over the thick text book splayed open in front of her. From where I sat, I could see the pages divided with the hieroglyphics of […]
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This October I missed New England’s main event: peak fall foliage. For people unfamiliar with this phenomenon, each autumn the leaves all over this part of the country go on a hunger strike, leeching the green from their veiny hands to replace it with the most brilliant, jeweled earth tones of scarlets, oranges, and yellows. […]
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Parked in my driveway with my face resting on the steering wheel, to the casual passerby I probably looked like the “after” in an Ambien ad. I was listening so intently to the radio that I had my face mashed as close to the speaker as it could get. It was an interview on NPR’s […]
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There’s an episode of Friends where Rachel convinces Phoebe to get a tattoo with her. go Rachel has a small heart inked on her hip. Phoebe chickens out. The blue speck of ink on her shoulder is as far as she got before bolting. Rachel is pissed; they had a pact. “They use needles!” she […]
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