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Category Archives: From the Vaults

From The Vaults: The Heart’s Dandelions

(This has another part somewhere. Check the archives for the bit about opals.) My roommate came back from vacation outraged about a friend of hers, a boy who had been to her parents’ at Thanksgiving and had apparently been flirting with two of her other friends… had actually gone so far, in fact, as to […]

Americorps: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

No joke. Not only has John McCain endorsed a huge, semi-militarized, FIVE-FOLD expansion of AmeriCorps, as Jen pointed out, but the President has already initiated an expansion of the program into the hands of the new Office of Homeland Security. This may have been made independently of McCain’s bill, or not; I asked the press […]

From The Vaults: Remembrance of Martín Espada’s Class

…one time we were sitting in class and we hear this dreadful cheer from some not-far-distant football game and Martin looks to us wryly and says, a la stenography instructor, “Yes, young people, this is fascism” then, in his normal “I’d-read-for-PBS-pledge-breaks-but-I’m-just-too-cool” voice: “You know they’d do anything they were asked right now… Yes, kill the […]

From The Vaults: Essay I wrote for a really awful nonfiction course at Smith

On Grammar, Syntax, Punctuation, Spelling, and Capitalization Punctuation Gandhi once said that a society could be judged by the way it treats its animals; but in truth punctuation is the one true measure dÂ’une societé, the one true measure of a society. Whole city layouts can be read in its skillful use: the courthouses, the […]

From The Vaults: Vacation Diary August 1999, San Francisco

Crappy motel. Proof positive that the “sani-bands” on toilets mean nothing: I pull it off our room’s toilet cover and find drops of urine all over the seat. Hotel’s neon sign is right outside our window. Trolley goes by every ten minutes or so and the Patel Motel Cartel is having a family reunion next […]

Found Documents: California Calendar Journal

I discovered that I’d written the following down in the back pages of an old wallet calendar. Sometimes in college a situation or discussion seemed so important I decided I must write it down right then and there for a later assignment or personal project. It bothers me no end that I have no idea […]

Never sent

You see, this is probably one of the most jarring revelations of your path towards sensibility: people on the right have a deep faith in the essential goodness of their fellow man. I’ll let you fill in the comparison for the left. We have a deep faith in the essential corruption of everyone. And a […]

This post has been arrested for posession of an incendiary device.

From The Vaults: A Leg… Now I Get It…

from a family trip around the West, junior year of high school …Montana has always seemed to me to be a big grey area, the border of the known universe, the last bits of accessible territory on a Nintendo game, further from the sun (well, it is), and therefore constant clouded winter. I felt this […]

from a letter to Chase

Subject: I laughed until tears came to my eyes (which wasn’t too much of a stretch, seeing as it’s one of those perma-tear days at my house… I screamed myself hoarse at my afterschool class of third-graders today, and then actually burst into tears in front of them. you know there’s no going back when […]