Tumaini –– (Swahili Verb) Hope, to want something to happen. Here, where hope is tumaini are animals everywhere, everywhere animals. Horses on the cigarettes. Rhinos on the matches. Water buffalo nickels jingling around in your lizard stamped coin purse. Do you have a rhino to light my horse? Animals as currency. You never forget the elephants…
Fifth graders, I have decided, from a marginal sample size in an unscientific setting, have trouble with understanding cause and effect. Take this conversation: “Did you hit him?” “No.” “I saw you hit him.” “Because he hit me first.” “Why did you hit him first?” “Because it was a redo and he said it wasn’t.” No,…
Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson to any length is a lot like spending an afternoon in a pottery museum. Imminent disinterest is moments away in every pottery museum on earth. Half the time they are not even pots, just shards of dirty glass under clean glass. But let’s put away the dirty dishes from the museum, I’m here to give Emerson…
Some came here looking for it, asking for it, basking in it and bleeding it. They packed their bags and hopped a plane or train wearing their I’m-going-to-go-off-the-deep-end trunks. Some came here for other reasons—jobs probably—and heard its whisper rise to a cry and threw their brief cases out the office window and flipped off…
Students in the Bronx after-school program I work with informed me that mother’s day was coming up. I would have had no idea. I’m sure Facebook will tell me the day of, but it should tell me with enough time to hook mi madre up with a box of eccentric awesomeness that seeks and delivers a holy marmot manure! surprised face.…
The following is a bit of prose I wrote in March on an overnight bus ride from Kenya to Uganda. Sometimes it’s the means of transportation that connects, as my thoughts jumped to three years earlier, when I was on an overnight bus on the other side of the continent, Morocco and them meandered from this to…
Game of Throne fans, you are about to love this analogy. Imagine living in a city, we’ll call it Meereen, (wink, wink people who’ve gotten through the fifth book) where you lived in constant fear of dragons swooping down from the murderous skies to attack and kill you. There is also a distinct possibility that…
I am Facebook friends with my thirteen-year-old brother John and was recently doing a little low grade stalking of his profile to see what he was into what I could that I did not already know from being his brother. It turns a whole lot. My brother is widowed. What heart-breaking news for Facebook to…
Photo credit: www.go4costumes.com Put for a moment on hold everything you’ve heard about branding yourself and what you should share online and how that could be harmful to how your “professionalism” is viewed. One 21st century Boogie Man goes by the name “Potential Employer.” Tequila at the bar with your friends? The girl who…
No one hates the skylines that make you feel omniscient to a well kept world. From the apartment I just moved into there’s a window in the common area that you can stroll up to and look out at a horizon bordered by the Empire State Building and The Freedom Tower, finally, reaching like forgiveness to the sky. There’s…
