I love to travel, try new foods, ingest caffeine, and watch political news coverage. A psychologist by training trying to bring a little common sense to it all.
Lies make the world go round. Especially mothers. As author John Green said, “Mothers lie. It’s in the job description”. We don’t like to call it lying. In fact we invent all sorts of euphemisms for it – gilding the lily, telling tall tales, inventing a fish story, […]
The ability to “pass” is often a loaded term and a loaded action. My son and I both can “pass” in different contexts for different ethnic or racial groups. When I visited Egypt, they thought I was French. When I lived in Spain, they thought I was Tunisian. […]
Thought I saw a double-headed dog and had to blink twice. Was I hallucinating? Was their weirdness afoot? I looked around. Fortunately, I saw a sign posted outside a Hispanic eatery that said “todays special rice with chicken”. Ok. All was right with the universe. The daily special […]
I became a java junkie late in life, despite being Puerto Rican (most Puerto Ricans drink coffee like water). I didn’t start the habit until about ten years ago. I was finishing my dissertation, which is the equivalent of saying I was spending several years poking my own […]
Without any particular effort on my part, I seem to have achieved mythological status at my last place of employment. Apparently in a fit, I stood up on a table in the middle of a team meeting and announced how full of crap everyone was and resigned on the spot. […]
I have been a bit unhappy with academics as of late, in particular, the “parachuters” who occasionaly drop into the community and call themselves community researchers. In the interest of fairness, I feel I have to turn the same critical eye on the sordid underbelly of community based […]
Last week’s buzzword at the International AIDS Conference is marriage. Not the gay marriage debate currently raging in the United States, but rather the marriage of biomedical advances with behavioral interventions as the next step forward in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Certainly, biomedical advances alone are not enough, […]
To quote the Beatles, “they say there’s gonna be a revolution”, when it comes to social media and HIV. Or maybe it’s already happened. Wikileaks, the Arab Spring (turning out to not be so Spring-like), and the various Occupy movements certainly demonstrate that social media, in which we […]
It’s not a coincidence that “meaningless” is synonymous with “academic”. Since the collapse of the academic job market in the 1970’s, universities have been cranking out doctoral students across a wide range of fields. And as the graduate student population sells, the relevancy of academic research shrinks. Smaller […]
We have much to learn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For those of you who live under a rock and have never seen Buffy, the opening credits tell you what it’s all about – “In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the […]
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