Giving gay its due

 There is this friend of mine who always introduces himself thus: ”I’m —– and I’m gay.” A ’straight’ acquaintance once asked him, ”If being gay is as natural as being straight, why do you have to announce it? I don’t tell the world I’m straight!” I have no idea what my friend said in response; the question was rhetorical anyway, [...]

Back from … er … nowhere

I know. The blog has been silent for over a month. I offer only my stunningly original philosophy as explanation: I blog when I have something worthwhile to say, not because I have a blog. Ha!
It was vacation time last month and I was generally, languorously, indulging my latent laziness. That explains a lot doesn’t it? But there was work, too. Trying to [...]

The tyrnny of tim and txt

Last Wednesday I bid farewell to another year of my life, letting it slip through memory into the confines of history. My history. And, reluctantly, I welcome the grey hair, wrinkles, surprises, pleasures, crises, wisdom, experience, deja vu of another year of my life.  With the hope that the  year will be different from the previous ones, but not so different that I [...]

Mother language, slang, grammar, and other driftwood

February 18. That’s when I last posted. And much water has passed under the bridge since then. Mother Language Day, for one, which passed by on 22 February. Not uneventfully, for I got my kid to promise early that morning that he would henceforth speak only his mother language at home.
So I waited eagerly for him after school that day, hallucinating fondly [...]

Whatchamacallit

The only explanation I offer for the title of this post is that I can’t think of anything else!  
Writing is not easy. And I don’t mean just titles. Writing five sentences on nothing in particular can be tough, too. This was an exercise I gave my students in one of their introductory syntax classes for the semester. Saves me [...]