Writing

Humans are defined by our fear of the unknown, and by our gnawing compulsion to understand it. It winks at us through the sublimity of nature, and bucks like a beast of unimaginable strength when we attempt to understand and harness its mysterious power. Peel back the paper veneer and enter the living heart of The Odyssey by Homer and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

My younger sister, Aly, is within the 99.9 percentile for height in the world, only 0.1% of people in the world are in her height group at 6’9”. She embraces her stature and the sometimes amusing absurdity that comes with living in a world built for people who are a fraction of her size. As a giantess with a bubbly, inquisitive personality her presence is powerful and magnetic. Coming across a modern embodiment of an Amazon (legendary and mythical female warriors from the times of ancient Greece and Rome) can be shocking and exciting to strangers on the street or those first meeting her, but to me she’s just my little sister.

"...Such an idea reassured whites, insecure of their obvious social dominance, that they were rightfully in power and that there was no threat of losing authority. In the '30s, rigid, one-dimensional typecasts were just beginning to develop complexity thanks to the actors who performed them. Bill Robinson “was congenial, confident, and very very cool. Unlike Stepin Fetchit, he was articulate and reliable,” says Bogle. Because of his positive character attributes, there were far less complaints against Bill Robinson from civil rights groups than there were against actors like Stepin Fetchit."

"...Outside I saw my ally who was on stage entertaining a large group of people, she winked at me very expressively and sent me a big shiny rose emoji, kissing it first. When it arrived it was a real glowing rose, I kissed it heartfully and tucked it behind my ear. My male ally turned to me and began to tell me things I didn’t know were going on with my mother. The authority had wanted to put her on a whole shopping list of other dangerous sounding drugs to help her better “adapt” to the matrix..."

"...You look right, and glimpse a row of beautiful and strange bodies - black, naked silhouettes of trees rising straight out of river pools. The sun appears for the first time all day and reflects stinging white off the water, which is so high it’s almost parallel with the road.

This exact spot is known as the Oxbow Marina, on the cusp of three towns. The painter Thomas Cole sat on Mount Tom - (you look up and see its peak) - in 1836 and painted “The Oxbow,” which now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On the naked rocky bank of the river, tourists gather to walk amongst ancient dinosaur tracks frozen in stone. Dinosaurs ruled this planet before us (230 million years ago), and for much longer than us (160 million years)..."