A friend of mine, whenever she encounters a problem, reminds herself of the Scale of Aleppo, wherein she compares her misfortunes to those of the people trapped in the vicious civil war in Syria. Husband running late? Barely a one on the Scale of Aleppo. Boss being an asshole? A three, at most. It’s an admirable strategy. It’s also something which, I feel, it would behoove the protagonists of The Royal We to try. Twenty year old Rebecca Porter, on a gap year from studying […]
My Chemical Renaissance
I am an English teacher and, as such, I regularly teach Shakespeare to high schoolers. This is nearly always met with varying degrees of trepidation; even the ones who like literature and who have a good grasp of the English language find his works somewhat daunting and often boring by default. And I get it, I do, but it’s such a shame. Once you get the hang of it and manage to pierce through the – admittedly often dense – language, Shakespeare was an absolute […]
Lose Yourself. Bring Sunscreen.
So. Get this. There’s this guy, right? He’s a super-secret, super-smart, super-duper spy person. He’s, like, the youngest of his kind EVER. His parents were viciously killed when he was young, but that’s okay because he was adopted by this really rich couple who loved him and turned him into a super-spy. And now? He’s an all-American hero, strong of jaw and willpower, on the hunt for a super evil radical islamist terrorist who is planning to unleash smallpox into the world. The only question […]
Why on earth are you there, when you’re everywhere?
There’s always something eerie about hotels. Whether you find yourself in a grimy one-star hostel sharing your room with seven snoring strangers or in a five-star joint, it takes a certain repression of deeply ingrained evolutionary beliefs to lay down your head on a foreign pillow and surrender yourself to sleep in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by others, some of whom can easily access your room should they choose to. Of course, the sense of company, the knowledge that you are surrounded by those in […]