As if the media hasn’t been dismantling women’s bodies into parts for long enough, now our politicians are also doing it.
Archive for the ‘Body’ category
Till human voices wake us, and we drown
Because of a family medical history predisposing me to cancer, I have an MRI screening at least once a year, sometimes twice. Most people I mention this to express a claustrophobic terror of this experience, but I find there’s something perversely peaceful about it. Getting tucked into a heavy double layer of blankets, I start […]
I want to get old
Reading this excellent, somewhat-Shandean meditation on the glories of post-menopausal life by Roseanne Barr got me all jealous. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been spending a lot of my time around post-menopausal women lately, but I’m going through a phase in which I simply can’t wait to be in my mid-50’s. I think that’s […]
Being there
I’m falling for Tara. Tara Brach. The woman who combines Western psychology with Eastern spirituality. I’ve alleviated the boredom of my morning physical therapy for back pain by listening to her Radical Acceptance audiobook. It’s kind of awesome. She has ways of dealing with life, the universe and everything. It’s an ideology, but not one […]
Unwarranted exercise
It seems like my new friends here are determined not to let me go gently into that good fall of keeping chin-stroking office hours and toddling back to my house for a grilled cheese and soup. Let’s hunt down a new dive bar! Let’s go see a play rehearsal! Let’s join a local meeting about […]
The hair whisperer
It’s 10 p.m. and I just got home. From the salon. No color, no perm. Just the hair whisperer. I found the hair whisperer many years ago, thanks to a friend. His tattoos and combat boots were a delightful rarity in the Georgetown salon. I knew my life was changing when he took my hair […]
St. Ann’s Kids . . .
Well, my sister finally passed away. It’s been a long time coming since she had lived with Multiple Sclerosis for 25 years. This is a photo of her oldest child with my son. The big kid was adopted into my parents family in 1980. The little one born into the extended clan in 2004. The […]
Siddhartha on the prairie
The American midwest is the last place I expected to find Buddha. It’s too pragmatic, too meat-and-potatoes for a spiritual practice whose ultimate goal is elimination of the self. The people here are friendly, solid, circumspect, sincere. For nearly twenty years I have lived like an expatriate, shrouded in my New England cynicism and snark. […]
I didn’t go full Sinead
My hair hasn’t been this short since I was six months old. It’s a strange feeling. When I was a little girl, my mom used to say if I didn’t want my hair brushed, she’d have to cut it all off. I said, go ahead. I hated having all that hair. It’s thick and frizzy […]
Widening gyre
This whole month, both of my literature classes have turned into discussions of what defines the human and what we assume that humans deserve by being human. We’re reading a lot of 18th-century stuff on colonialism and slavery, so it keeps coming up, even if I fear that the conversation is getting wide of strictly […]
