Employed skillfully, the metaphor is a powerful communication device. What better way to examine its effects than by visual metaphor? Suppose, modestly, that individual H is seeking to regale individual S with a captivatingly told account of an experience the former has had. Let the truth of the experience be a point centered within a…
Imagine this yellow circle is a young man named Jack. Jack is friends with a young blue circle man named Jim. Being friends, Jack and Jim regularly share in each other’s company and engage in behaviors typical of friendship, such as discussing matters of mutual interest, jointly participating in recreational activities, requesting assistance of one…
People without progeny have difficulty conceiving of what it would be like to have a child. This is wildly unexpected. It seems their prediction effort should yield something more veracious, more definitive than an ever-receding mirage of uncertainty, especially since the future they’re trying to imagine is, in many ways, simply a reciprocal of the…
In spite of all the negatives that tarnish much of the advertised allure, there is at least one societal benefit to the existence of smoking as an activity. That it is an intangible benefit and is consequently difficult to quantify should not be interpreted to mean that its impact is negligible. After all, many of…
Every day at work there are lulls where I’m left on my own to spend an hour or two as I wish. I’ve heard from former interns who recall with theatrical exhaustion the weeks they spent in certain departments without being tasked with anything, and how their time in these departments was characterized by boredom….
My driving instructor raced cars in Germany four decades ago. He teaches a very precision-oriented, methodical, and engineering-friendly approach to vehicle maneuvering known as reference point driving. Rather than be at the mercy of the optical illusions associated with gauging distance by looking at objects through windows and in mirrors, reference point driving uses the…
I’m reading Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by neurologist Oliver Sacks. I found it at the library on a shelf of new releases. The new release designation means little more to the library’s information system circuitry than that the time between check out and due date is shorter. It needs to be returned…
A collection of romantic sentiments, based on experiences I’ve had since elementary school, presented in the style of R.D. Laing’s Knots: The type of girl I want is not the type of girl who would want me. You only want me if I don’t want you. I only want you if you don’t want me….
The Federal government has made me an offer I can’t refuse, and that should only facetiously be interpreted as an allusion to The Godfather. It’s a step backward in the sense that I’ll be returning to Alaska. It’s a step forward in the sense that I’ll be in Anchorage, living in a place of my…
For the past few days, anytime someone in my family has done something that usually bothers me, it hasn’t. My father’s audible nasal breathing at the breakfast table, or my mom making the till downstairs with the loud coin-sorting machine, none of it has bothered me anymore. When they happen, I think of how it’ll…
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