Often, I ponder how many incredible ideas end up falling through the cracks over the years. How many great ideas, including pitches for manuscripts that never get written that could be mind-altering and life changing, are lost forever because they got caught in a waste-bin or spam filter? I wonder how many great writing careers…

I awoke at midnight from a nightmare monochrome world entirely drained of color, my identity violently stripped away by some unseen force. When I finally awoke from this overwhelming level of fright, I found myself gasping for air. After I finally found my breath, it occurred to me that the nightmare was a reflection of…

Once, I wandered a crooked path through the twilight of mediocrity. It wasn’t a choice I made myself, but seemingly one that I inherited as a member of a lower middle-class family. My station in life seemed signed, sealed, and delivered, then neatly folded into a filing cabinet beside the birth certificate that called me…

Today’s educational paradigm of oversimplification has caused intellectuals such as myself a great deal of grief. The lure of simplicity is the crux upon which knowledge today is distilled down to something palatable. But to take simplification to the extent of pacifying the lowest common denominator is an elixir for comfortable complacency which we often…

Every so often, we find ourselves at moments of sudden clarity. Unfortunately, most of us dismiss them while being distracted by things of the moment, or categorizing them as inconvenient truths we’d prefer to ignore. For whatever reason, I find these moments come at almost regular intervals for me. Perhaps it’s because I consciously partake…

Everything looks different in the dark, and because of that, you think differently, too. It’s why for many years night drives became my primary source of inspiration. Many night drives made up much of my time that I lived in the state of Colorado. Naturally, it’s a beautiful place; generally, the people aren’t that bad,…

Many of my memories are filtered through the bittersweet hues of “almost.” From the earliest moments I remember of my youth, I’ve embarked on a surreal adventure of nearly-there’s and not-quite’s. I’ve skimmed the surface of greatness, only to watch it vanish like a mirage. I was the princess of the penultimate, the ruler of…

As I write this, it’s nearly Thanksgiving. I find for all the evil that has befallen the world this year, I still have plenty for which to be thankful. Indeed, this year I found the love of my life, someone who finally gets me the way I get her. We found something special in our…

I’ve often pondered about past lives, wondering if my more fantastic dream states are based on some distant truth. Are they some sort of flashbacks from a life my soul lived millennia ago? We all live many lives through our dreams, whether they are merely constructs which our unconscious creates for dreamers to explore, or…

In one way or another, we’re all masters of disguise. We don the masks that suit the roles we’re expected to play. Sometimes we do so with such finesse that the lines between the character and actor blur into nonexistence. In the realm of education, I’ve often found myself in the midst of a grand…