Several major life events have conspired to keep me away from printculture for so long and I've found it exceedingly difficult to get back into the writing game, despite telling myself that I should really just sit down and get started. So here I am. How to start? The biggest game changer was the birth of our child last summer TWO summers ago. In fact, the printculture cohort has been having something of a baby boomlet, with two recent arriva...

I spent the first forty-seven years, two months and two days of my life wondering what the hell was wrong with me. After I discovered there was nothing wrong with me, my life became more complicated, but infinitely better. I hope you get there faster.

The consensus today seems to be that Freud’s theories have become the property of the humanities (literature and film criticism, ethics, history and history of religion) and are generally not taken seriously by professional psychologists and academic psychology departments any more. . . .

1. A rock climbing move last used in the college Quad came in handy: one foot on the microwave and the other wedged into the handle of the refrigerator door allowed me to open a cabinet whose contents, untouched for the last three years, were a mystery. What I found: six large stoneware plates and bowls, six heavy stainless steel napkin holders, a special device for storing and pouring cooking oil, and a set of wine charms. Apparently when I m...

For a few years now we’ve had this bedtime ritual: we take turns saying five things we’re thankful for. As I sat down to write this I couldn’t remember why we began the practice; but looking back at my old blogs I see that it was a response to W’s increasing desire for the things (and brands) his friends had. I wanted to take some time each day to acknowledge and appreciate what we already had. His first list (made while in the bathroom brushi...

We start out early in the morning, just as K has for the thirty years since his mother died. In the beginning he and his father and brother needed to leave early because the day-long trip required multiple bus rides and a good deal of hiking; we leave our warm apartment just after breakfast to avoid traffic and to preserve the rest of the day for other pursuits. Instead of taking a bus we hop in the car with armed with snacks and audio CDs for...

One of the few good things about moving, which I otherwise abhor, is that it gives you a chance to clean house, to take stock of your accumulations and sort out the clutter. Because we’ve moved so much in the past ten years, we’ve managed to divest ourselves of much of the kind of junk that can usually pile up unnoticed in the backs of closets and in basement storage spaces. This puts us at a disadvantage at white elephant parties when a truly...

This past weekend, I celebrated my 39th year. “Celebrated” is too strong a word; “acknowledged” might be better; “begrudgingly acknowledged” more accurate still. I’ve never been one to regret my vanishing youth or bemoan my advancing age. But then again, I’ve never been so close to 40 before, that cultural milestone, the marker of the zone of life called “middle age,” the seedbed of intense anxiety for youth-obsessed America.

Many moons ago, I wrote here on printculture about the prospect of joining Facebook and seeing what my students were up to in their virtual social milieu (at the time, I referred to it as “the Facebook,” that’s how in the know I was). Well, I got as far as signing up—getting a username and establishing a password—but I never did get around to signing on. So, in fact, I still don’t know what Facebook looks or feels like as a social space. Now,...

I remember the moment I decided to learn Chinese. I was three thousand feet above the surface of the earth, flying back from a visit to my in-laws. I felt rested after a week away from the office and relieved to be heading back home. In Greek myth Atlas drew strength from having his feet on the ground but I seemed to be gaining power the higher we flew. I felt as if I were standing high above the slipstream of time, looking down upon all t...

I went into the city the other day — you wouldn’t believe how disgusting it was. Every office, every bar, there was a clump of people standing outside smoking and no room to go around them. On such a gray day you could hardly tell if you were inside or out. Throw in packs of taxis and all the delivery trucks and it felt like there was twice as much carbon as oxygen.

K Klingensmith’s post “Pictures of You.,” on medical images of the body, asks the question, “For the person who sees a copy of their X-ray, MRI, or sonogram, how can it seem like their body?” I’m fascinated with this complicated sense of dissonance between the body that we experience and the image that we see — between the body that we experience and the mystery of its inner workings, proceeding without our knowledge or control. What stories ...

For the past four years I had a 5-minute drive to my office, before that, a 10-minute walk. Not since a summer job after freshman year have I had to commute on mass transit. Now, having moved to a new city in a new state and started a new job at which I’ve been working since mid-July, I commute about one hour by train each way to an urban campus. After the initial shock and fatigue of the early morning schedule and the rush hour crowds on the ...

We’re deep into the process of buying our first home, an endeavor complicated by the fact that we’re doing the transactions from out of state. We had given ourselves five days to look at properties and make a decision—foolhardy, perhaps, but we reasoned that we’d have to find a place to live anyway, so why not get a pre-approval and go take a look at what’s available. But this post isn’t about the incredibly stressful process of buying the mo...

As I struggle with end-of-the-semester burnout, wanting to take a nap but instead having to grade essays and continue with administrative work, I thought I'd offer some of my scattered thoughts in response to E Hayot's post from last week, specifically on moving and on the work of printculture, not in that order.

My father-in-law moves quickly, with the posture and sense of command of an aristocrat and the body of an old solider. He sits down with precision, taking inventory of the food on the table. His old clothes are fraying at the edges; he will wear the same pair of old socks until my embarrassed mother-in-law surreptitiously discards them. My father-in-law's grandfather was a wealthy landowner who served in the court of the last king, but my fath...

I didn't have a camera with me (to be honest I don't own a camera) so I won't be able to replicate the photojournalism of Riis. Instead I'm offering some stolen images as companions to my observations of Providence, Rhode Island, from where I have just returned. My purpose in visiting was primarily pleasure, not business, so my comments on Brown as an Ivy League institution are limited. But I did party with some grad students and poke my way t...

The e-mail from my Aunt Lynda said just “Call me” under the subject line: “Your father.” What has he got himself into now, I wondered. Was he about to get married, the romantic 70-year-old? Had he invented a new form of currency? Had a small island nation finally invited him to be their king? As I went downstairs imagining these pleasant and not unlikely scenarios, the phone rang. My father died last Friday, abruptly, a...

Years ago, comedian George Carlin observed that on the freeway, everyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and everyone driving faster than you is an asshole. (I cannot find the exact citation, at least partly because, delightfully, a Google search for “George Carlin asshole drives idiot” [in and of itself a great newspaper headline, with or without punctuation] produces some 39,000 results, only a few of which seem related to t...

Matthew Miller was a Jewish stoner who dropped out of high school in upstate New York to follow the hippie jam-band Phish around the country. He grew his hair in dreadlocks and listened to Grateful Dead tapes. After finishing his studies at a wilderness school in Oregon, where he rapped at open mikes and practiced beatboxing in his bedroom, he moved to New York to attend college at the lefty-alternative New School. Sometime around 2001, he ...

At some point during my childhood, I realized that I had an inordinate fondness for voices. Certain people would speak, and I would find myself lulled into a blissful, anodyne trance. I first noticed it while watching Bob Ross on TV, that hippie painter with the red afro on PBS’s “Joy of Painting.” I must have been eight or nine.

I'm just back from California and here's what I saw.

Or: “What traveling means to me” I have returned home from my trip and am unpacking. Home’s familiar textures and smells are comforting and reassuring if a little dull. After three weeks of imposing on people with more real estate our apartment feels smaller than I remember but my hands, with memory of their own, can still find the light switches in the dark. Each trip is an emotional journey, beginning with excitement, anticipatio...

Sometime in the last few years, I developed a strong and undeniable aversion to making phone calls. I have no problem picking up the phone when it rings, whether in my office or at home. And using the cell phone as a walkie-talkie to coordinate meetings with friends or family is easy. But having to initiate a phone conversation with someone is something I do reluctantly, something I put off doing until absolutely necessary or try to avoid alt...

As a young boy in Seoul my husband K ran around in the streets playing soccer with his friends, blissfully ignorant of time and responsibility. But at dinner time the smell of cooking rice from all the houses in his neighborhood would call him home.