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How Did I Miss This Book as a Kid?

After getting off to a slow start, with my parents called in to school when I was in first grade because teachers were concerned I wasn’t picking up reading quickly enough, I have been a voracious reader most of my life. My memory is fuzzy on this point, but I think my interest in reading kicked into high gear around third grade and by the time I was in eighth grade I was an advanced…

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A Social Contract of Care and Concern

  I found the above story on Twitter. It is attributed to anthropologist Margaret Mead as told to Ira Byock. It relates how Mead felt that the first sign of civilization within a culture was finding a broken femur that had healed, indicating that someone had taken the time to allow an injured person to heal by protecting and caring for them. It’s an interesting story, though the tweet has since been removed, probably because…

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Writing in My Sleep

Royel M. Johnson posted an interesting question on Twitter recently. I shared the tweet with a reply: “Yes, I definitely write in my sleep.” A quick, throwaway tweet. Or so I thought. A friend of mine suggested I write a blog post about it, so here we are, after a week of dream-writing. As soon as the suggestion was made, my sleeping brain went into overdrive and presented several vivid dreams with writing elements in…

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