The small walfdorf-esque grade school I went to was heavily into drama. We used to do several plays a year with the whole class. Mostly they were mythological themes: the Norse saga, the Krishna story, the Gilgamesh epic. I loved it. When our school principal’s daughter opened up an acting school in Royal Oak, I and a bunch of my schoolmates signed up. That led to a few auditions and a couple of very minor local jobs, mostly commercials, a couple of which even paid …

…Millionaire Magazine? No. No, I don’t. Not on its pages either. So imagine my surprise when I found a family photograph of mine had been stolen and used to promote a lame holiday-photo competition of a glossy, nationally-distributed for-profit magazine. A letter to the editor demanding proper attribution produced a bland apology and a request to overlook the mistake since the magazine existed only as an act of charity to “help the bumiputra”! And only Malaysians know how many mistakes they are expected to …

So it looks like I won’t be making that trip home to Michigan that I thought I would this June, due to, how you say, irresolvable differences of contractual interpretation between myself and my employer. I’m tempted to give in to sentimentality here and list out all the things I really miss about home, but where would that get me? The places you dream about are also the places your nightmares come from, and so maybe I ought to reflect on that.
This is the Southfield-Jeffries Interchange, …

hat street was amazing. I remember people bringing camels and elephants that kids could ride for a fee, and trained dancing bears and snake charmers performing.

Today I am 30 years old. Between you and me, that is old old old.

…of Ethnicities, Nationalities and/or Socially Constructed Identities That I’ve Been Mistaken For:
Put on a kufi and grow a beard and it becomes harder and harder to take advantage of institutionalized white privilege…

Middle Eastern [I'm sure all the converts have gotten that one before.]
Turkish
Arab: unspecified
Arab: Syrian [On the flip side, a Syrian I ran into at a gas station looked at me and said, “you’re Ukranian, aren’t you?” My mother’s side of the family is in fact from Ukraine. He explained that he had met a number of soviet …

Dolphin Street: A photographic tour of the 13500 block of Dolphin Street, Detroit MI, 48223.

When John Walker Lindh’s story first broke, I remember reading about it and thinking, Good Lord, he could be my brother. I put together the chart below as one of my first web projects. It feels dated now somehow. Maybe people don’t even remember who John Walker Lindh is. Here is what I wrote about him at the time [1] [2].

Ithaca
by C. P. Cavafy