Alto el Fuego!

I’ve been going over my house supplies list and realized that nearly everything I buy is just some (often expensive) variation of soap and paper.

Soap: handsoap, bodywash, shampoo, baby shampoo, SoftScrub, bleach, kitchen dishsoap, dishwasher detergent, laundry detergent…

Paper: toilet paper, paper towels, printer paper, art paper, napkins, newspaper…

A Cuban friend of mine, Jorge once remarked how silly this was: Una crema for this, a special handsoap for that…

He once noted that Americans are so spoiled that they would stop in the midst of battle: Mosquito! Alto el fuego! Alto el fuego! (Hold your fire!) Then he motioned an insect spray bottle. Pffft! Pffft! Pffft!

Someone’s (Un)lucky Day

A correction in The Baltimore Sun today tests the fates: “The Maryland Lottery evening Pick 4 numbers yesterday were incorrect. The numbers for May 23 are: day, 4472; evening, 0412.”

Alas, it’s either a don’t-count-your-eggs tale that proves most cynics right or fodder for a fiction short story . . . imagine who threw away the winning ticket . . .

What the M-HEC?

Why is it always one step forward, four steps back?

The most recent loss for middle-class parents in Maryland is the axing of the distinguished scholar program, a scholarship that can provide up to one-third the cost of tuition at state universities.

See my letter to the editor in the Baltimore Sun. You can also check out a related story I wrote regarding the limitations created by the state oversight board, the Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC) that ran in the October 2010 issue of Urbanite magazine.

Unintentional Parody

Note to Science Channel re: “Monster Bug Wars”
A monster-truck, professional-wrestling, hyper close-up weekly series about gooey battling bugs?
Really????????

Worry-free Cruising?

I was out on the Atlantic Ocean for the past week. Took a very anxious mother on a cruise through the Bermuda Triangle (first time she has ever been out of the country). When I suggested a cruise as a great way to go international, her first question was: What about pirates?

Really Living . . .

In a panel I led at the Conversations & Connections writer’s conference, I finished my presentation with a writing prompt: “Write about a time or event when you lived unsafely, but really lived.”

One of the writers blogged this terrific essay.