I could see her from the end of the block. She was sitting on the sidewalk under the yellow-orange street lamp, next to a pile of white rubbish bags from the nail salon next door. There was something white sticking from her mouth, bigger than a cigarette. A thermometer maybe. And she was holding an ice pack over her eye. It was fresh, which meant … Continue reading A Terror and an Aphrodisiac
Do you remember the story your Uncle Wen told us before we went to get our tattoos? How Dragon, the water spirit, and Phoenix, the fire spirit, met and fell in love? How they became so enraptured with each other that they shirked all responsibility, seeking only to be in each other’s company? But without the dragon, the waters did not run and the rain … Continue reading The Dragon and the Phoenix
I need to be better at handling them. I don’t even take my own advice and end up making things worse. It’s just so damned hard. To be clear, pedantry is not disagreement — although any disagreement automatically opens a lot of ground for pedantry. Someone is not being pedantic simply because they have a different opinion or are making a contrary argument. The point … Continue reading Pedants are Assholes
In the early 2000s, I took a second job teaching Biology on nights at weekends at the local community college. Teaching Biology means teaching evolution, because nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. It was then I realized just how awful science education is in this country — how we spend 95% of class time on atomic facts, treating science like … Continue reading The Shocking Truth
