Conversation Starters

I am terrible at math. You might (wrongly) assume that I'm being hyperbolic about this -- but when I tell you my addition-subtraction-multiplication-and-division skills are lost in a box in a subbasement of brain power somewhere -- I really mean it.  This morning I was watching an old episode of The Wire  where Bubbles, a heroin-addicted street hustler, presses his new teenage business partner (business partner?) to do the quick math of 5x4 plus 6x7 and shakes his head in disgust when the kid can't immediately spit out an answer. And it made me feel a certain way -- for I, too, couldn't do the math that fast. Bubbles would never want me working his cart with him. Say la vee. And while part of this is simply by virtue of being, oh, twenty-something years out of my last math class, part of it is how I've always been.  Math was always a challenging subject for me in school.  I struggled to see how the quadratic equation applied to my everyday life.  And I thought t...

Recently, I met up with a friend of mine from MSASS and had an incredible four hour lunch where we caught up on our lives and talked about what's teaching us these days.  Near the end of our time together, my friend was talking about how she sometimes falls into this "therapist" role with people to help them "solve their problems."  And I smiled at her and said, "Let me throw this at you and see how it sticks: what if, instead of the problem-solution model, you used Asset Based Community Development?  What if instead of deficits, you thought about strengths?" My friend grinned at me because she knows my affinity for ABCD, so she indulged me as I explained: "I think in my own life, I've struggled a lot with this idea that I should 'get over stuff.'  That there's a pressure to 'get over' a relationship or a traumatic event or really anything.  What does that even mean, 'get over it'?  Who does that language benefit?  ...

As you may know, I'm a fan of the podcast   Ghost of a Podcast .  This weekly show is hosted by the psychic/medium/astrologer Jessica Lanyadoo where she answers a listener question and then gets into the astrological forecast for the week ahead.  Sometimes I skip over the listener questions because her answers are so specific to this one person's chart and while that can be interesting, it's not always the sort of voyeurism I'm into on any given day. This week, though, the listener wrote about her own psychic abilities and how she'd followed them in pursuit of finding her own life partner.  Now, I'm not super-expert on this, but what I know about psychics and mediums is they often can't "read" themselves -- so I'm going to chock this up to the listener's own intense gut-instinct and intuition, which is what most psychic ability derives from.  Anyway, this listener said she asked the Universe to bring her a soulmate and it did -- but what sh...

This morning I watched a documentary called  Risky Drinking  that profiled maybe five different people with varying degrees of binge drinking habits or lifestyles.  My experience viewing this film left my stomach feeling a little swishy because nearly all of the vignettes felt like they could have been lifted from my own life experience in some way shape or form... But what actually got to me?  Right at the very end when the filmmakers added some notes about "where these people are now," the final screen read like this: The first half of the message displayed first and it gave me pause in the same way the word "help" in this context gives me pause anymore.  I can tell you from very personal experience how futile and useless the word  help  is.  You can help someone paint a wall.  You cannot help someone see things they don't want to see, change things they don't want to change, make choices they don't want to make.  You can support, you ...

How many of you have watched  The Queen's Gambit  limited series on Netflix?  How many of you fell in love with the beauty of the cinematography and the choreography of chess?  How many of you dusted off your old chess set or went out and bought your first one as a result of your binge-viewing?  How many of you were enchanted by the story of orphan Beth Harmon (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) and how her stoicism and hardship was rewarded by an international platform where she was paid to play mind-games? Raise 'em high, friends.  I know you're out there. I'd heard from many friends and saw folks on social media gushing about the series and so when I ran out of free episodes of  Survivor  right at the end of my semester (don't tell me things don't line right up in this life), I decided to check it out.  I'd heard mostly good things but one sort of sardonic and vaguely scathing review from Louis Virtel on the podcast  Keep It  where he wa...