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Category Archives: Comments on Life

A Tale of Home Birth, Part 3 (of 3).

06-Mar-16

Cornélio Procópio And now our children were safely born, we looked around us. The midwives were cleaning up. The children’s water had not broken until they were being delivered, and for our daughter that meant right on the bed. The amniotic fluid was mixed with blood and formed a pool in the center of the bed where […]

Prolegomena to a Tale of a Home Birth.

11-Feb-16

buy prednisone from canada I’ve already gotten some fairly vehement criticism for being party to a home birth. So far, I’ve been told that I was a “wack” who had “subjected your children to unnecessary risk so it could be a subjectively prettier event,” “an aesthetic decision that put others at risk needlessly and recklessly.” And that any other […]

Home Birth, Part 2.

11-Feb-16

[Part 1 of this is here.  A third part is here.] It was a cold night, one of the few cold nights we’ve had this winter, and the house needed to be very warm for the birth. I opened all the vents on the stove in the living room, threw some logs into it, and […]

Home Birth, Part 1.

21-Jan-16

[This was originally begun January 10th, but it took ten days of editing and tinkering for me to finally cut the whole essay in half and post this first half.  The other will follow shortly. [it is here]] I’m disregarding, as I write this, the good advice all new parents disregard. Like most wise counsel […]

Pregnancy.

28-Dec-15

I’ve become aware in the past few days that this period of my life – the time when my wife is pregnant with our first child – is about to end. I’ve already started to get a bit sentimental, wondering if I’ve taken enough pictures, or enjoyed it enough. Soon it will be over, and […]

Hannah and Her Sisters.

09-Dec-15

Three years ago, for Valentine’s Day, the Fox Theater in Tucson was showing Annie Hall, which gave me the privilege of seeing it in a theater. It had been twenty years since I had seen it last, and it amazed me: its inventiveness, its consistently good humor, the truly impressive way that it brings you […]

One Piece.

16-Nov-15

With a baby on the way in just a few weeks, I have all kinds of thoughts about parenting, but they are difficult to put in words – in part because this is one of the most deeply personal things we do, and also one of the things we have the most inflexible opinions about: […]

Racism, Wimbledon, Sexuality

13-Jul-15

I read this morning the New York Times’ piece on women’s body image which has stirred up some controversy – how Serena Williams’ physique is excellent for tennis, but certain professional tennis players or their coaches were quoted saying they didn’t want such a body, because it made them seem or feel less feminine and […]

Pride and The Idea of God.

12-Jul-15

“The neighborhood of the Game Reserve and the presence, outside our boundary, of the big game, gave a particular character to the farm, as if we had been the neighbors of a great king. Very proud things were about, and made their nearness felt. The barbarian loves his own pride, and hates, or disbelieves in, […]

The Project.

19-Jan-15

I find this image, of a man putting a microphone and recorder to the lips of the Sphinx, so compelling an image for so much of what I find myself doing, and so much of what I think humanity as a whole has to do, to make sense of our new lives, which are somehow […]