Stories from LA

the musings of a procrastinating mind

Stories from LA header image 4

Entries Tagged as 'general'

The language of home

April 25th, 2008 · No Comments

I’ve lived away from home long enough that when my mother says something about getting pop in a grocery store with a lot of ambient noise my mental word filters don’t parse that she’s talking about soda.

[Read more →]

Tags: general

Stating the obvious

January 13th, 2008 · 1 Comment

I’m in the process of switching this blog over to a self-hosted word press blog. I might even start writing in it regularly.
So you know, under construction, blah, blah, content coming soon, blah, blah. Etc.

[Read more →]

Tags: general

No Clemency

December 12th, 2005 · No Comments

I wish I had something insightful to say about Schwarzenegger’s decision to deny clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams. For me it comes down fundamentally to the fact that I am firmly against the death penalty. Given that, I need not delve any deeper into the questions of guilt vs. innocence or whether Williams has […]

[Read more →]

Tags: general

Children in public places (and as public goods)

November 11th, 2005 · No Comments

So there’s been some discussion in various places of an article in the NY Times about a coffee shop in Chicago that put up a sign saying “children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven.” This dovetails with something else that I’ve been […]

[Read more →]

Tags: general

How do we solve problems that have no solutions?

September 27th, 2005 · No Comments

I started writing this over a month ago and never finished. Story of way too much of my life right now. But the thoughts seem coherent enough as started. So you get that.
Twisty at I blame the patriarchy has been critiquing the patriarchal nature of fashion this week. There’s a whole […]

[Read more →]

Tags: general

The Commodified Body

August 5th, 2005 · No Comments

What does my body mean? What is it worth? Who does it benefit? How much are you willing to pay for it? Despite four years in women’s studies classrooms and half a lifetime of personal feminism, the questions still sound a little strange to me even as I ask them. […]

[Read more →]

Tags: general

Can I Learn to be Angry More Constructively than a Five Year Old?

July 17th, 2005 · No Comments

How do we negotiate anger in an ethical way? I ask this question because it is rooted very deeply in a personal situation right now. But I think it is important, too, to think about in situations that are less immediately personal and more about community, about institutions and the people within them. […]

[Read more →]

Tags: general

Excuse the dust

June 24th, 2005 · No Comments

Ok. I think last night I fixed the formatting problem. Indeed I think I fixed it in both firefox and I.E. (different renderings of CSS in different browsers are the bane of my webdesigning). I haven’t tested it on any of the Mac browsers so if anything looks rabidly amiss let me […]

[Read more →]

Tags: general

The Cult of Perfect Motherhood

June 23rd, 2005 · No Comments

A woman on a livejournal community this morning posted that she’s stressed out because her husband wants a baby and she wants a baby too, BUT she also wants to finish her PhD, to teach, to write, to publish (presumably to get tenure). I responded that it’s not an impossible situation if her husband is […]

[Read more →]

Tags: general

Historical subdivision?

June 10th, 2005 · No Comments

I live near downtown L.A. in a beautiful reasonably well-maintained Victorian house (see photo). It really is lovely, and it makes me very happy to live here. Our lovely, well-maintained house, however, is flanked by two horrendously dilapidated houses. Since I don’t actually own property, the state of the neighboring houses is […]

[Read more →]

Tags: general