Friday after Thanksgiving I hiked with a couple of friends up North and South Fortuna mountains. We came across two mountain bikers on the steep saddle trail up to the first peak. One guy was on his back in pain, while his friend was bent over him wondering what to do. I noticed the scratched up bloody knee first, so of course I whipped out my first aid kit and handed some bandages and some antiseptic wipes to the friend,…
I wrote this for my Narrative Writing class, back when I was a writing major. The assignment was to write some childhood vignettes, done as though through a child’s eyes. The vignettes were based on real memories of my childhood, playing with my cousins Anthony, Beverly, and Cathy, and my sister BJ. Anthony, Beverly, Cathy, and I scatter as Bj counts to thirty. Here and there from hidden corners of the house I hear the rummaging around as the ABC…
I had Ms. Scarborough two years in a row—Advanced American Lit during my junior year in high school and Advanced Placement English during my senior year. She wore clothes from The Gap, and she said things like “A little less levity!” to us when we got a bit out of hand. She’s one of my all-time favorite teachers, though, because she always taught more than what was on the curriculum. For a school teacher, she was old school; she really…
Last year I took a BBC sex quiz and found out that the sex ID profile of my brain is completely down the middle. Now, I have no idea if that means my brain is asexual, or if it’s some kind of hermaphrodite—not that I can visualize my gray matter having both a penis and breasts, probably hiding behind the hypothalamus—but I guess at the heart of it, I simply don’t think like a man or like a woman. There…
I had Mr. Olpin for 9th grade English in junior high, and I was one of his best students. It was in his class that I had the Lady or the Tiger writing assignment, and after reading a few of my other stories and essays, he saw me after class one day and asked me why I was in his class and not in one of the more advanced English classes. It was because of him I took advanced English…