…[R]efugees would not risk their lives on such a dangerous journey if they could thrive where they were. ~Melissa Fleming, office of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Too many people in the West, particularly in the US, seem to think that refugees are moochers who want to selfishly come here to get something for nothing. We have little to no idea how refugees become refugees, and more tragically, we often just don’t give a damn. It’s not our problem, right? “If these people would […]
How many cats DOES it take to qualify as a crazy cat lady?
I’m not sure precisely where the line falls between well-adjusted individual and crazy cat lady (or cat person, to be gender-neutral), but I want to say for the record that the quantity of cats in my home is within the legal limit. I have a deep appreciation of felines on both an aesthetic and a scientific level. I’m not one of your run-of-the-mill cat lovers who will squee over every cat video on YouTube–except maybe this one, and possibly this one, and well, maybe I do […]
“Life is made of these moments – of one’s physical being moving through time and space – and we string them together into a story, and that story becomes our life.”
Here’s something weird. I read this book a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t put it down. I kept talking about how great it was and how much I loved it. And then I kind of forgot about it, and just moved on to the next book. Which, considering that Noah Hawley is mostly known as a TV writer, sort of makes sense: Finish up one episode, and get ready for the next. You may know Noah Hawley as the mastermind behind the amazing Fargo. […]
Immigrants! We get the job done?
Getting through Drown, a collection of short stories by Junot Diaz, took me close to a month. This delay was due to my very bad, no-good month of January, which included some emotional fall-out after the inauguration and the first two weeks of this administration. I can thus say that the stories in the book can be divided like so: Read pre-Trump vs. read post-Trump. Obviously this wasn’t Diaz’s intent – after all, it was published in 1996 – but personally, for me, the short stories […]