My 17-year-old son is a High School senior, and he's shopping for colleges. I joke with him all the time about going somewhere nearby. "Hey, this school looks good!" I say, about a school scarcely two miles away. We happen to live in the Boston suburbs, where every school "l...
I've been an active runner for a long time. As I explained a few years ago in My Running Habit, I never ran long distances as a kid, but eased into increasingly longer runs as an adult. Now I typically run over 20 miles every week. It keeps me somewhat sane, and even more th...
I was digging through old files, and found the essay I wrote when I was applying for admission to UC Santa Cruz. I was a student at Cabrillo College, a community college in the area. I had been studying for around 3 years after dropping out of high school at the age of 15.
...
If you're anything like me, you probably have some amount of trouble keeping up with your tasks. I usually fluctuate between being "moderately on top of things" and "OMG I am so not on top of things" and "I'm completely overwhelmed and can't do anything."
For many years I h...
I'm a parent of elementary school kids, aged 6 and 9. I volunteer in many aspects of my kids' school, but among the most rewarding of these experiences have been the times I've volunteered for our school's Hour of Code event.
Lack of diversity in the tech industry is a syst...
Many women are chiming in for #MeToo, to raise awareness about the common experience of being sexually assaulted or harassed. It drives home to me how easy it is for myself and other men to remain oblivious about the problem.
Obviously, boys and men are also victims of assault and harassment, but the sheer number of women who are speaking out drives home the disparity.
My family and I went apple picking today.
I grew up in California, and apple picking was not a part of my culture. California is a very agricultural state, but there aren't many apple orchards. In retrospect, I don't know why I didn't do more strawberry picking, or for that...
I've been active politically for my entire adult life. I have voted in every Presidential election, usually for the Democratic candidate, and always for a candidate who reflected my hopes and aspirations for the country. Clinton in 1996. Nader in 2000 (in California, for wha...
I spent the past week in San Francisco, not attending Apple's WWDC, but rather basking in the periphery of it. I attended Jessie Char's Layers conference, and spent the rest of my week being projected like a pinball, sometimes slowly, sometimes at enormous speed, between the...
If you're not familiar with the podcast Song Exploder, I encourage you to check it out. In it, musicians dissect their own music, digging into the nuances of instrumentation, inspiration, etc.
Last night I heard a fully formed episode, in my dreams, of another podcast calle...
Catching up with the Roderick on the Line podcast, episode 187 includes a discussion of the temperament of musical instruments. In particular of the piano, but also a nod by John Roderick to some B-string-flattening guitar folklore espoused by Eddie Van Halen.
In my travels...
I've described my running habit before, wherein I run "every other day," more or less without fail.
Today Boston was hit with a significant snow storm. Schools are shut down. The city is blanketed in white. It's a sight to behold.
And it's my running day.
That's just how I roll!
I finally got around to reading the widely-celebrated New Yorker article about Megan Phelps-Roper and her departure from the Westboro Baptist Church, a hate group based in Topeka, Kansas.
The article is a fascinating profile of a young woman who transitioned from a committe...
I was a sprinter as a kid: I counted myself among the fastest runners in my grade-school classes, and would routinely challenge friends to ad hoc dashes across arbitrary stretches of playground grass or asphalt.
As much as I enjoyed pushing my body to its limits for these e...
I like pizza. Shocking, isn't it? Like many people, I have enjoyed the delicious combination of dough, sauce, and cheese since I was a kid. For a long time I dreamed about making my own pizza at home, but it wasn't until I was around 30 that I finally decided to give it a tr...
I was moved to write a Yelp review for a particularly good Dunkin' Donuts (767 Cromwell Avenue, Rocky Hill, CT). It's not normal to feel moved to review a more-or-less gross fast food place, so I thought I'd keep the review here for posterity.
Stopped here unexpectedly ...
For most of my life, I have borrowed hours from the late night and early morning, paying off the debt by either sleeping lavishly through the day, or coping with the zombie-making effects of sleep deprivation. Lured in by the (probably false) promise that endless, quiet hour...
I'm listening to the audiobook of Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, set in an approximate dystopian future where, among other things, youth lingo has evolved even further along its current trajectory towards what Wikipedia classifies as SMS language. OMG, you don'...
We are pretty lucky here in Ditmas Park to have access to several nice restaurants, some of which double as cafes. But there is a relative void of businesses going all-out after the cafe niche.
On my way to the supermarket this evening I noticed a "soft launch" for a busines...
