Yesterday I saw a FB ad for a credit card offering cards with your chosen name, and several comments were sneering about “Why don’t you just get a name change? Anyone can.” So. Having just finished the court process of changing my name, here’s what it involved: 1. I mailed in my application on May…
Author: Clio
4/10
For anyone reading this blog and not my other social media, I wanted to let you know that my inertia isn’t gone, I’m just working on a long piece that’s taking up most of my creative writing energy. Basically, a November novel, just not in November. So I’m writing more each day than I have…
Bird, You Can Fly
i keep my wings clippedso that i cannot fly away i keep a hand over my mouthso that my words can’t be heard i keep a shadow in my brainto suffocate my thoughts and who has wrought these chainsthat keep me in my place? this is fear: that i will try and failand so i…
I Don’t Know What To Wear Today
I don’t know what to wear today. Sometimes I think about wearing a dress, long and flowing and covered with flowers. Wisterias, perhaps, to match my nails. Or lavender, or purple hyacinths. But then a voice inside says: “What a joke. You’re a joke. You don’t have the body for a dress like that. You’re…
On Jada Pinkett Smith and the “Joke”
I’m not going to talk about the slap. I’m not going to talk very much about the joke, because there are at least three levels to it. I’m going to talk about one of those three levels. I want to make it clear that this is a small part of The Incident. The Incident and…
Basic Operators: Addendum
One thing I realized while writing and editing the previous article is the depth of the mismatch between notation for addition and multiplication (on the one hand) and exponentiation (on the other). Students struggle with understanding the notation \(y = b^x\), and one reason that’s been clear to me is that there’s no overt operator….
The Basic Operators
By the time most students graduate from high school in the United States, they have seen the following operators*: Addition, subtraction, negation, multiplication, division, reciprocation, exponentiation, radicals, logarithms, sine, cosine, and tangent. There is a certain symmetry in this list: They are clearly grouped in threes, and I’ve listed them so the traditionally dominant one…
Big Boned
My father insisted: “I’m not fat, I’m big-boned.” And though his Buddha belly strained at his clothing, it was true that his frame took up the whole of the room. He was not just six foot four. His rectangle was a door frame, and his voice was a thundercloud moving through the air. I do…
March 27, 2022
The other day I kept catching my reflection in the window at the restaurant and the body dysmorphia was so strong. It wasn’t disgust at my gender, not at my weight, but at my presence. My frame is so freakin’ large compared to how I feel. I want to take up a tiny little space…
What is Subtraction? (Reflective draft)
Conceptually, subtraction and addition of negatives are two very different processes. Subtraction involves an undoing of addition: It is an inverse function. Addition of negatives involves an extension of the number system to a mirror world. The Exploding Dots model, for instance, relies on this extension. That is, here are two ways we can see…