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Nothing Personal

I asked the post office clerk why she was smiling. She said she’d just gotten off the phone with a woman who insisted her mail wasn’t being delivered. I asked what was funny about that. The clerk rolled her eyes. She said the caller was upset because all she received were bills, never personal letters.

Setting The Borders On Desire

He looked odd, hardly lovable. His head was elongated from the pounding it had taken against a cervix that did not fully dilate. He was covered with blood and amniotic fluid. When he took his first breath, he closed his eyes and screamed. The sound, the sight of him, and the profound terror of being a parent took my breath away.

A Perfect Right To Love

How did this happen? How did my desire for a baby escalate during the past few years from a sweet little notion that fluttered through my mind now and then into a full-scale, unrelenting obsession? At what point did I lose all sense of proportion and patience?

The Birds Of Silicon Valley

My job was to write computer training programs. But sometimes my mind wandered, and I turned to look out the window at the people in the parking lot, the cars on the street, and, especially from my sixth-floor cubicle, the birds that soared in the gulf of air between me and the ground.

Double Blind

When Healing Is A Gamble

I’ve been a medical research subject for two years now. A human guinea pig. There never really was a choice. I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), an illness for which there is no cure or treatment, an illness so misunderstood and misnamed that it has been virtually ignored by most medical practitioners and researchers. Calling this Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is like calling Parkinson’s disease Chronic Shaking Syndrome: the name addresses the symptom not the cause of the disease.

Venice Shimmers

Meanwhile, less than a day’s drive from here, the fighting continues in Bosnia, where tens of thousands have been killed or displaced, where starvation and concentration camps and rape hotels have become weapons in a campaign of ethnic extermination. Yet Washington is by and large indifferent, as Bosnia sits on no oil fields and sends neither Democrats nor Republicans to Congress.

A Burden Of Violets

All the men concentrated on the distant stripper as if that were where the action was, but I figured her bumps and grinds weren’t worth a drop in the bucket compared to the swelling in unison, the mass erections, of her all-male audience. It was a vision of group genitalia that struck me with a pang of beauty — what I feel when I think of the first green shoots of spring.

Conjuring Tibet

Turning youths loose on actual or possible dissidents was probably the shrewdest and cruelest of Maoist strategies. Here were True Believers, lacking life experience to complicate their thoughts, still endowed with the primal cruelty of children. Having internalized the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution, they were empowered to indulge in any form of torture, from breast amputation to castration, secure in the righteousness of their cause.

From Yale To Jail

For no reason I can explain, I began to discover how little it matters where you are or what anyone does to you. I was sure that what I had done to get put in the hole was right, and somehow the longer I was there the better I felt.

Banana Hymn

You were ready to don the handcuffs, leg chains, and orange, ill-fitting jumpsuit required of all prisoners in transit. But you didn’t really want to go to your dad’s funeral. That’s what you’d told the man a few weeks before his bone cancer finally killed him.