I’ve never been good at math. I remember my parents making a teacher give me extra math assignments so I could practice more. Hours and hours of sitting at the kitchen table with my father. I do a problem, and he’d ask me how I’d solved it. Most of time, it felt like dumb work. He’d look at me and say: “You have to understand the process.” And I’d do the problem again. I’d start out fairly confident, but then… Read more »
Things you should know before metamorphing
Last spring I heard a fascinating story on NPR. It was about the memory of caterpillars after metamorphosis. The scientist interviewed described how her researched uncovered the fact that caterpillars have the ability to remember things even after they have become transformed into moths. That was not the most interesting part of the story for me. She said that caterpillars don’t just “put on a change of clothes” to become butterflies, but rather they go through a “biological meltdown that… Read more »
Proud Flesh
I received my first badge sometime during my elementary school years. I went through quite a growth spurt. At some point two large ridges of flesh appeared. Caramel colored fault lines along each shoulder where the skin yielded to the rate at which it was asked to grow. In my senior year in high school, I lost my left ovary to a cyst the size of a lemon. It had wrapped around the fallopian tube and crushed it. I felt… Read more »
