The day’s grammar point was: I’m too something to do something or I’m so something that I can’t do something. My instructions to the class: Make pairs and prepare a skit using the following guidelines, but feel free to expand beyond it. Let your imaginations run wild: Student A: Hey _____________ , let’s do something [...]
I have two third-year students who, over the course of the past three years, have made it their prime directive to shock and amaze me…and their escapades have escalated with each passing year. Just try to imagine Abbott and Costello, then picture them together as Junior High School students in the 21st century. Now picture them as [...]
Fade in: Sunny morning, Brownstone and tree-lined street in Bedford Stuyvesant Brooklyn NY. On the corner, a group of 6, sharply dressed men and women are congregated. They are JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES. They huddle momentarily then split into two teams of three. One group crosses the street and, parallel to one another, both groups proceed up the block. At [...]
As I laced up my boots preparing to leave my house, I realized that the noise that had awakened me an hour earlier than my alarm and the sound I’d been trying to ignore all morning was the patter heavy rain makes on galvanized metal, like the kind on my neighbor’s porch roof. I turned to my right, in the vestibule, and [...]
He boarded the train and scanned for a free seat, spotting only one, the one beside me. I was reading a book, conspicuously paying him no mind at all while indirectly, peripherally, watching his every move. He approached the seat beside me cautiously, glancing around as if praying that another free seat would reveal itself. None did. [...]
This morning I was on the train checking my emails when we pulled into the station. It was packed to the teeth and about to get more so judging from the lines on the platform before the door near me. I turned around and braced for the surge. And it came. As usual the surge [...]
I remember the first time I read Toni Morrison’s masterpiece, “Beloved.” (I say ‘first time’ because it took me three reads to fully absorb it.) She changed all my ideas about what writing was all about. She went ahead and set the bar so high I couldn’t even see it. Not to suggest that before there [...]
There’s an ongoing furor over a Japanese McDonald’s ad campaign featuring a white flunky japanophile who can’t manage to get nihongo (spoken or written) through his thick foreign skull…reinforcing this and other negative stereotypes about white foreigners, as if they needed reinforcing… Mr. Debito even compared Mr. James to Stepin Fechit. I don’t know about that. I thought it was ironic, [...]
Last night I had the strangest dream. At my job, one of my co-workers was an android…I guess “android” is really an outdated word. Showing my age I guess. Cyborg sounds too sinister, though. Robot sounds too metallic. The point is it was not human. The strange part was everyone knew it wasn’t human but [...]
As I entered adolescence I realized a couple of things about my fascination with Peter Parker (Aka Spider Man). One was that I loved the stories, the whole drama of his existence. I started writing around that time. I created my own little universe in the form of stories starring a black Spider Man who [...]
...cuz we all need defense against the dark arts!
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Raw Like Sushi
