From the Kinēsa Newsletter
First World Problems
It started with a drip. A delicate but nevertheless relentless Chinese torture, steady and eternal, from the bathroom sink. As people who like to think that we have better things to do with our time, we ignored it. It became a companion, a little tick, tick, tick...
It’s For You!
I'm old enough to actually have had this kind of phone in my house. When it rang, the entire family would jump. We never knew if it was good news or bad news, but it was most certainly news. We didn't know that that odd feeling we had when someone yelled through the...
Ants “R” Us
I was going to call this the year of the spider. When we lived in NJ, we had spiders crawl into forgotten corners, spin webs in light fixtures and occasionally venture onto the kitchen floor. But nothing prepared us for North Carolina, where brazen representatives...
Kvetching About Vetch
I should have been working on the book chapter that was coming due. Or finishing up that talk I have to give in a few days. Or at least doing some free writing to give voice to the thousands of ideas in my head. Instead, I was on my knees in the dirt, battling crown...
I Am Legion
My sister and I were recently wondering whether our grasp of the continuously evolving vocabulary of the English language would help us prevent dementia: terabyte, download, netiquette, malware, neuroplasticity, acid-reflux, bromance, bingeable, biohack, microbiome....
My Theory of Everything
There is a Chinese belief called the Red Thread, or the Red String. The gods tie a red string that connects a person to a destiny, usually in the form of a soulmate. No matter what happens, the string can be pulled, tangled, knotted, but it never breaks. All of us are connected via a complex tapestry of these threads.