Life Between the Lines

Although my incredibly mild, clinically undiagnosable, and relatively insignificant memory  deficiency  doesn't quite match up to the anterograde amnesia our protagonist Leonard Shelby from  Memento  has (maybe my "condition" will end up in DSM-6 or something anyway), it's certainly been annoying in everyday life. I rely on sticky notes of different colors, different sizes, and different shapes to keep track of what I tend to forget. One stack of sticky note pads lies directly on my desk, another sits in my desk drawer, and another lives in the Notes apps that I've learned to love. There's one major problem though: I'm not always sure what my half-asleep brain means when it scribbles a couple of illegible lines or how ungrammatical fragments are supposed to be translated into coherent ideas. It's what I call the lost-and-found problem. When I was nine (or somewhere around there - again, my memory's not the best), I forgot my swim bag at practice, m...

Through too many hours spent on social media and online forums, I've found that there's a semi-universal experience: reading To Kill a Mockingbird  in class towards the end of middle school or beginning of high school and often — but not always — hearing a non-Black person in the classroom read out the n-word. The argument over teaching To Kill a Mockingbird  is one that has existed since its publication and will likely exist for long after the next generation finishes high school. Some administrators might have more "traditional" rationales for banning the novel (for instance, the appearance of racism is enough in some areas), while others have repeatedly stated that reading such novels by uninformed authors is not the way to have educated discussions on racism and other social issues; they're fine with making students feel uncomfortable by discussing racism, but there's a problem with how the issue is presented. However, many argue that TKAM  is an importan...