It occurred to me, while I was having my face rubbed with some substance I didn’t bother to look at or question, that I might be the only woman in my family who doesn’t actively, regularly set time aside to relax. When my family was going through financial hard times and we sat down as […]
The only reference I’ve ever really seen to sensory deprivation tanks was on “The Simpsons,” when Lisa and Homer use deprivation tanks and Lisa learns how to empathize with her dad after also tuning into the existence of her cat, a tree, and Cokie Roberts. Ever since then I’ve been curious in a sort of […]
I credit my fiancé, Michael, with any knowledge I have about prisons, prisoners, and prison justice. Early in our relationship, he told me that he was fascinated with criminal justice after watching “The Wire.” Then it was serial killers, and over the course of years that’s morphed into an insatiable passion for information about our […]
I will admit that I was introduced to the concept of tantric sex in my adolescence when I came across that Sting quote about how he could have sex for 7 hours straight (which he has since clarified as being a boastful overestimate, and which, frankly, sounded not so fun even to my teenaged self). […]
I’ve gotten fairly comfortable with other people seeing my vagina, which is the word that I’m going to use not for its literal meaning but as a catch-all phrase for my entire set of genitals. Part of this comfort comes from the fact that I have had urinary problems since I was a wee lass, […]
I’m a Humanist, and if I believe in anything, I believe in the human imagination. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the concept that religious and spiritual belief are based in real-world facts, the way a lot of religious and spiritual people do. To me, spiritual belief is part of the human […]
I grew up with a meat-and-potatoes, South Dakota and Nebraska raised mother. The woman wasn’t exposed to seafood much as a kid, except for canned tuna, and in turn she didn’t expose us to it much, either. One of my sisters developed a taste for it anyway, but now she’s a vegan, so it’s a […]
I don’t know when or where exactly I became terrified of bees, but I think I got a clue during a beekeeping class this past Saturday, when I texted my mom and sisters a picture of a hive. One sister responded “That’s terrifying,” and the other just said “WTF.” So I think this must be […]
Here’s something I don’t want to admit: I’ve been advocating getting tested for HIV for the last half of my life – literal half; I’ve been doing activism in the LGBT community since I was 14 years old. But despite being sexually active for almost as long, I’d never gotten tested myself. There are a million […]
