thematically fickle

One of the first things my daughter says to me after waking each day—now that she’s evolved from the larval stage of infancy into a strategically manipulative human being—is “Please eat peanut-jelly.” Then she follows it, while shaking her head slowly, with “No hair, mama. No hair today.” Generally speaking, I comply with her first [...]

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The four of us stood in the street looking down at the shattered glass, the many pieces glimmering with the headlights of each passing car. We’d just come from a restaurant in North Park where we’d stuffed our bellies with rich Italian food and red wine and sated our appetite for lengthy bouts of laughter [...]

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Some people say that real men love Jesus. I know some people say this, because they say it loudly on bumper stickers affixed to Mustangs and muscle trucks. To that, I offer this retort: Real men don’t advertise their spirituality on a bumper sticker. I’d like to see that on a car while I’m stuck [...]

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“I wanna get married,
Yes, I need a spouse.
I want a nice Leave it to Beaverish,
Golden retriever and a little white house.
I wanna get married, I need to cook meals.
I wanna pack cute little lunches for my Brady Bunches,
Then read Danielle Steele…”
—Nellie McKay
My home has been transformed from a happy bungalow to a menacing Palace of [...]

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“As a society, we pay a price for our silence. Unchallenged personal, cultural, and institutional racism results in the loss of human potential, lowered productivity, and a rising tide of fear and violence in our society. Individually, racism stifles our own growth and development. It clouds our vision and distorts our perceptions. It alienates us [...]

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All I ever learned in school I get to relearn. 
My friend’s sixth-grade son Evan shuffled into my office the other day.
“Hey, Aaryn. Do you have a calculator?” He came around the corner, offering up a coy smile, his dark eyes partially hidden by a slightly askew, oversized baseball cap. He got braces two weeks ago [...]

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Following the release last week of new statistics supporting a decline in U.S. abortion rates—statistics that both pro-life and pro-choice advocates claim favor their stance—I decided to link on over to the Guttmacher Institute website to see what I could see with my own eyes.
The Guttmacher Institute is the nonprofit organization focused (hallelujah!) on reproductive [...]

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Healthcare sucks, and the world keeps spinning on her axis
“An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.”
—Tony Benn, former member of British Parliament
Because my intuitive child knows that I can’t possibly have imagined a more harrowing way to ring in the New Year than to navigate our nation’s health care system, she decided [...]

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Here’s some free birth control for anyone on the fence
(Adapted from a previous blog post.)
I remember once, before I was a mom, well before I even thought I wanted to be a mom—which was only about three hours before I became a mom—being lectured by neighbors at my local dog park about how I must [...]

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A few things in our sorry little culture that make me an angry woman
While navigating my way to the day job the other morning, I got stuck in traffic that’s all too common with any weekday commute involving a freeway. There I sat, idling away my time and my gas, calming my nerves to the [...]

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