Dear blog, I’m sorry I’ve been away these past two weeks. It’s not that I didn’t want to pay attention to you, it’s just that I was a bit pre-occupied with re-locating all my worldly possessions 6km away from their original positions. But things are better now, and, like Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a…
(early post — chag sameach, happy Passover!) Literary theorist and critic Roland Barthes once wrote that the author is dead.
One of the many valuable experiences of my high-school education was being part of my school’s improv team. The Canadian Improv Games are a tournament for high school students who perform improvisational theatre. Teams of students compete in four out of five 4-minute-long events in which they’re given prompts from…
Everyone knows that romance novels are for women. And so are stories that focus on who’s hopping into whose bed and which couples will end up together. Everyone also knows that those kinds of stories are inferior. Why would anyone who’s not a woman want to watch (ugh!) The Notebook…
It took me twenty-nine years to discover that I didn’t hate pink. When I was a girl growing up, pink was the enemy. It invariably designated toys I did not want to play with, clothing I didn’t want to wear, and games that bored me. I was happier when I…
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lied to me. At age six, I saw that cartoon and believed that pizza was the most delicious thing I could possibly imagine. Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo scarfed down what looked like golden slices of warm, salty, cheesy goodness. Instead, what I got was a…
(To make my point, I’m going to explain the first fifteen minutes of Disney’s Frozen. If this would spoil you, do not read ahead.)
Ever since I finally finished reading the books I already have, I’ve been glutting myself on all the books I’ve wanted to read for the last couple years. Which means I’ve been doing a lot of reading this month and plan to do plenty more over the rest of the…
(But first, happy birthday to my friend Grace :) And many more!!!) Writing is a lot more difficult for me in the winter. Well, most things are a lot more difficult for me in the winter. My body just wants to sleep whenever it’s dark out, there’s a whole new…
In high school, one of our drama teachers defied us to think of counter-examples to this statement: “Every joke is about someone’s physical or emotional pain.” Slapstick, of course, is about watching other people get hurt. Reversal of expectations is often about the tacit stupidity of those not quick enough…