Tan lines are the bane of my existence right now. I’ve been spending lots of time outside and the necessary protective gear means that my face has all sorts of light and dark areas now. It’s worse than the contrast between my pale legs and dark arms, let alone the farmer’s tan I’ve acquired otherwise.
A year ago today, the world lost Dr. William Aprill. In the self-defense community, we miss him as a scholar and teacher. I miss him as a mentor and friend. Regularly, I think of issues personal and professional that I want to discuss with him, get his take on, hear his encouragement about. I’ve been
Whenever you are entering a new field, a new world, a new hobby, a new interest, it matters that you learn the words that people already there use, and learn how to use them as they do. I know it can seem confusing and overwhelming, to have to learn an entire new language on top
Today, I am extra proud of my friend, Sara Westman of Kitfox Design Group. She’s launching pre-orders for a really neat project of hers: the Vietnam Throw. The Vietnam Throw combines her unique style of art with a personal passion and a unique manufacturing process where the design is woven into the blanket itself on
This meme is about feminism and misogyny; this post is not. Instead, I want to talk about the idea of looking at how someone reacts when something isn’t going their way, and what it means for your relationship with them. It’s easy to be happy, friendly, and kind with someone who is agreeable. In fact,
One of the tires on my car collected a screw recently, which I discovered suddenly and with some dismay on Saturday. As I was running around getting it taken care of, there were a number of things I knew that made me feel better about the situation, and at least one that made me a
Now that we are emerging in to the post-pandemic landscape, one of the things I’ve been doing is ramping up my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training back up to pre-pandemic levels. It means more and more time spent struggling to escape inferior positions and survive against someone whose sole goal for the moment is to choke me
Travel. It’s probably one of the first and most frequent “on our own” activities many of us experience. As kids, it might start with summer camp, or being allowed to take the bus to a friend’s house. As we get older, we begin to hit the road for school and leisure, perhaps a spring break
New experiences are both fun and scary. We often seek them because we want to know what they’re all about. They sound interesting, or someone has told us how much we’ll enjoy them. At the same time, new is different. We have no true model for new. We don’t know what to expect, and that
Courage is what defines the brave. We think of them as heroes, the people we look up to. Rarely do we think of ourselves as one of them. We think of them as the people who run into danger, who save lives, who do the sorts of things that ordinary people can’t or won’t. Our
