A child pornography scandal gave him 15 and a half years in prison
When I was a kid, I remember Jared from Subway, who, in commercials, claimed he lost over 200 pounds just by eating Subway sandwiches and constantly presented before and after photos of his progress. He even showed his jeans of when he weighed more than 400 pounds as a comparison to his then much slimmer weight.
While my brother and I knew that you do much more than eat Subway sandwiches to lose 200 pounds, the effects still stuck with us — Subway became our go-to “healthy” fast-food restaurant. …
Exploring a case study in “ethnic fraud”
Race, as a social construct, has always confused and confounded me. The categories we put certain ethnicities always seemed arbitrary — why are Asians and Pacific Islanders grouped together? I saw a graph that separated the two groups for the first time in forever the other day, but I also always wondered why my Iranian friend was classified as “white.” One of my close friends in elementary school joked he could put whatever he wanted on the census, or at least he could choose between Black and Asian, having mixed Caribbean and Indian heritage.
Sometimes, hyperfocus on race and identity…
The writing will benefit as a result
Recently, as a teacher, with the impending end of the school year and more happening in my life, it’s hard to stay motivated writing. I don’t impose quotas on myself, but I do feel the pressure, or at least feel compelled to put words on the page. No matter what I’m doing or how busy I am, writing is one of the top priorities for me, and it compromises my identity as a writer when I don’t, well, write.
But there is one thing more important than writing, and it helps break me out of my temporary writing stagnancy. Instead…
Nothing about moving is fun
Nothing other than moving makes me realize I have some really, really good friends. One friend helped me walk a box spring more than a quarter-mile to my new apartment. My roommate helped me move a coffee table, and other friends have helped with minor parts of my move. I am not done, but the heavy lifting is out of the way (the mattress and box spring).
Moving, no matter how much you move, sucks. It’s by nature a major disruption in our lives. If you live in a city as I do in Baltimore, you have to hold up…
Maybe the anti-Trump is just what we need right now
During the Trump years, I couldn’t go an hour without seeing a notification on my phone about the latest outrageous and inflammatory thing Trump did or said. It wasn’t that I could just mute Twitter — it was every New York Times headline, half of my friends’ Instagram stories, and half of my friends’ Facebook feeds. It was literally impossible for me to tune Trump out because his outrageous actions and statements were so amplified.
Trump news always made me amplified. It always made me outraged and looking to pile on like and replies on Twitter. He constantly broke the…
The lesson? I need to slow down
I can’t seem to keep track of credit cards. Every couple of months, I have to get a new one. To be more specific, I’ve lost three credit cards and two debit cards in the past year. Luckily, none of these instances has resulted in someone else using my cards for fraudulent transactions, but it’s still a major pain to have to request a new card from my bank. While each situation obviously could have been worse, my habit of continually losing my cards is a massive inconvenience.
Plus, I don’t want to say “oh it’s no big deal since…
When we use people as vessels to live through, we dehumanize them
One of my first memories of teaching was when I was training as a summer school teacher. The kids were coming into the building for the first time, and my lead teacher was sitting at her desk. Out of nowhere a student came into her classroom and said:
“Is this Ms. Johnson*? You’re the reason why I’m here! You failed me!”
At that moment I was in shock. I didn’t know how to handle those situations as someone entirely new to teaching. However, my lead teacher, completely unfazed, rolled her eyes and said:
“No, you failed yourself. Go to class.”
…
Satire
“I know Vladimir Putin is a horrible dictator, but he’s a better dictator than he was last year.”
Local optimist, Jake Hill, has singlehandedly fixed all of the world’s problems through one mindset change: he adopted a growth mindset. Hill started adopting a growth mindset to his personal problems and expanded to be a proselytizer for the growth mindset for global problems as well.
First, Hill had a goal to cut down on the amount of Netflix he watched every day — instead of 10 hours in October, he resolved to only watch 9 hours and 55 minutes in November. He succeeded and patted himself on the back, citing a growth mindset above all else.
The growth mindset…
Hey everyone,
We hope everyone had a great week!
This past week, we published all of our contest pieces and we would like to thank all our writers and clinicians for submitting to our very first contest and give everyone a round of applause.
Here are the links to all the articles for the writing contest — every one of these is a terrific read, and we would all greatly appreciate everyone’s continued support of our writers and publication! The winners are all pinned to the top of the publication and will remain so for the near future.
1st place: “The Mental Health Stigma That Still Lurks in Medicine” — Dr. Marina Harris
“It has…
Apparently, several agents were out late drinking before the assassination
I can’t imagine a worse nightmare for the Secret Service than JFK’s assassination. Of course it didn’t look good for the agency, but I didn’t know many of President John F. Kennedy’s agents were permanently haunted. Clint Hill was one agent who famously leaped onto the back of the Kennedy motorcade from a trailing car, shielding Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy after he got shot:
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