Dear Mother Earth,
I am trying very hard to write a letter to you. We homosapiens have deceived you. You have left us a natural environment so astonishing but we have exploited it in an irreversible way. Mom, it is very rigid for you to realize that we have partitioned ourselves from you through the forms of ideologies, concepts of race, caste, identity, class and so on. This partition has now become an inevitable part of our lives. Without it, it would seem that we could not live anymore.
We homosapiens have now become technosapiens trying to tumble your nurture and love through our misuse of technology. Mom, we have become so materialistic to the point where we are competing and collaborating with each other for our own maximum benefit through exploiting your creations. Mom, now I...
Lifestyle
Dear Governor Brown,
My name is Caitlan, and I have an 11-month-old daughter, Maggie. Prior to my career as a stay at home Mom, I worked in the financial sector for over ten years. I am the type of person that eats as much organic and unprocessed food as I can, I do yoga and Pilates every day, and I lean toward acupuncture and herbs for non-medical emergencies.
I moved toward this “natural” lifestyle in my late 20s when I was having trouble sleeping. I went to my General Practitioner who proposed putting me on a low dose of Paxil. Instead of putting a Band-Aid on the problem and embarking on a lifetime of pharmaceutical dependency, I turned to acupuncture.
Within a week, I was sleeping fine. Though I loved and trusted my GP, I am a person who does my homework and asks questions....
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Dear Spanish host family,
In 1997 we sat around the table together in your middle-class apartment with the marble flooring. When my Spanish was bad we sang songs from The Little Mermaid in English. You overfed me with your omnipresent table bread. We drank yellow Fanta. When my Spanish was good we talked politics and you asked me about the death penalty and I explained how Texas was "básicamente un país distinto."
I can't remember your names. Dad, are you Juan?
You let me make you scrambled eggs. You'd never seen scrambled eggs before.
So, here's the deal: Americans are all the same, and I am an American. We are enthusiastic at first, heartbreakingly sincere at times, but with a disappointing lack of follow-through that undercuts it all in the end. I would apologize for that...
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Dear PhD Prospective (with kids or thinking about kids),
Thanks for contacting me. It sounds like you missed Steve Saideman’s sage advice and are actually going to be trying to get a PhD in political science. Many top people in the discipline will keep working to discourage you from attending – with your best interest at heart – but it sounds like you aren’t going to take their advice to avoid a PhD altogether.[1] So, welcome aboard! It’s a fun profession and you’re just at the starting line.
It also appears that you are either (a) a parent already or (b) thinking about becoming a parent sometime during your PhD. This isn’t surprising – a typical PhD path overlaps with a good chunk of a person’s child-bearing years. There has already been a lot written on how difficult it is...
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Dear Missionaries,
I like to tell people I’m a missionary convert, because I wear this genesis of my faith journey proudly, like a badge of honor. I heard the story of Jesus from your lips, sang the songs of worship in your language, and prayed for the concerns in your heart. You taught me how to be Christian.
I learned from your lavish generosity and boundless love and affection. I also learned how to do Christmas. One day in my freshman year of high school, I asked my Chinese parents if we could find a Christmas tree. This was before Christmas became commercialized in Taiwan, so all I could find was a tacky, tiny, plastic tree, which I set up delightfully in the corner of our living room. I arranged neatly wrapped fake presents under my wannabe tree and meticulously set up some...
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Dear Family and Friends,
Why I need to live as an Aspergirl (or a woman with Asperger’s Syndrome)
Lately you may have noticed what might seem to be an inordinate amount of self-indulgent navel-gazing from me. However I prefer to call it mandatory self-reflective self-awareness after a lifetime of avoiding dealing with myself and a feeling that I have a confused identity.
It’s only three months since the rather swift realisation that I must be on the autistic spectrum, and only 6 weeks since a psychologist agreed with me. And this processing and resetting of who I thought I was has brought enormous highs and lows (the lows mostly come in the form of unhappy memories), plus a tonne of necessary thinking. At 44-years-old, it’s an enormous thing to take in, and it can’t be done...
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DEAR MR. TIM COOK:
Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Chad Ramey and I’ve served this company for the last four years as a Genius at the Apple Arrowhead retail location in Glendale, Arizona (R247).
First of all, I would like to extend my thanks for allowing me the opportunity to work for such a unique company. It was truly one of the most heart-wrenching moments of my life when I had to walk out of that store for the last time; no one likes to abandon their passion, and helping Apple’s customers was not only something that I loved to do, but also something that I gave my entire heart and soul doing. It will be difficult to find another company that can elicit such a strong passion and devotion.
With that being said, I find my freedom from Apple to be a double-edged sword....
2,446
Dear son or daughter:
I take care of your mom. She lives at the end of the hall and has flowers on her door and peppermints in a dish by her chair. She is here in the nursing home because her health is failing.
It has been failing for a long time now, but I understand how hard it was to accept that her falls at home were not just because she was “getting clumsy,” as she said. Her increasing confusion over conversations you had with her was not just because she simply “forgot” or “wasn’t paying attention.”
I recognize your feelings of guilt that she is here after telling her years ago you’d never “put her in a home.” And the mixed emotions you have toward your siblings, who aren’t convinced she needs to be “institutionalized” but also don’t live nearby and haven’t experienced the...
2,583
Dear Penn & Teller,
I really don’t want to say this, but I feel obligated to. I’m afraid you screwed up. Big time. (Of course, if this weren’t a generally family-friendly blog, where we rarely go beyond PG-13 language, I’d use a term more like one that Penn would use to describe a massive fail, which, as you might guess, also starts with the letter “f”; I think he’d appreciate that.)
I’m referring, of course, to your appearance on The Dr. Oz Show one week ago (video: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). Before I begin the criticism, let me just take care of the obligatory but honest statement that I am a fan. I’ve been a fan for a long time. Indeed, I remember seeing you guys perform in Chicago back in the late 1990s when I was doing my fellowship at the University of Chicago. I’ve also...
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