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Make Better Dialogue by Reading it Out Loud

In 1990, I attended a summer camp for children with talent in art — I applied to the writing division and was quite pleased to be accepted. It was a sort of validation that came with the knowledge that somebody that wasn’t extremely biased (my family) actually thought that my writing was better than average. I spent many hours writing and rewriting stories, short plays, monologues, character sketches, and just about any other form of fiction that you can imagine.

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Using GoToMeeting to Teach from Afar

I had a surprising experience thrust upon me this week at my place of work, leading me to see the possibilities for the future of teaching. It happens that this week I have been also looking for a partner with whom I can study advanced topics in Jewish study — better to study that sort of thing with someone than to be left to ones own devices and just interpret things however one wants. Since I know that there is no such thing as coincidence, I was pleasantly amused when I found myself in the role of the teacher this week.

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The Album as Storytelling Device

Individual songs often can serve to tell a story — good or bad. Cream played a song called Crossroads, later widely covered by Phish — it was based on the story of how Robert Johnson got to be great at playing the guitar after meeting the devil at a crossroads and selling his soul.

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The Unimportance of Celebrity Makeup Status

What is it about human beings that cause us to simultaneously seek ways to look up to people while at the same time finding ways to bring those people back down to our own level if we perceive them as getting too high?

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The Deadly Marriage of Drugs and Creative Expression

When I was a teenager, the writer I put on a higher pedestal above all others was Hunter S. Thompson. I thought I surely wanted to be a writer in the sense that he was a writer: To get involved so deeply in the stories that I would actually become part of them, and to make sure that I always got the most exciting stories even if it meant risking my life to get them. Part of that path, to me, meant that I had to do things just like Hunter.

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Favorites of 2009

The year was an interesting one, to say the least. It saw me relocating to a more permanent place of dwelling — my futon surfing days are over. It also saw me finding new interests in the music field, including a re-ignition for my passion for vinyl.

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The RevAbs Review

On November 15th, I started a new workout program called RevAbs. It’s not that I was unhappy with my morning workout per se, I just wanted to invest a solid three months into a structured workout regime — moreover, I specifically wanted to target an area of my body that I felt had been really hit hard by poor diet and lack of physical activity for the majority of the time that I lived in Seattle — my abdominal area. What better workout program to use than something called RevAbs — right?

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