… so slip inside this funky house. It is a fact of age that home has replaced voice as the central metaphor for my life. Lately my blog has added home as a new theme to my various motifs. “The home” has always been in my thinking and writing, but it’s surfacing differently these days. This is a year of symmetry and reckoning for me. I reckon fifty years of life, twenty five of them sober, one of them divorced. I lived in my house just a year, now, with it as mine alone. Poverty forced me into transience, from place to place for thirtyRead More →

Christmas, 1967. The stuffed bear ever at my side is Loofy, short for Lucifer. Lucifer, a hand-me-down from my aunt, was a best beloved and devilish beast who stood up to hellish things in the night. If I recall the story correctly, Loofy was named after Lucifer brand matches. His name bears a pun, for Lucifer is the bear-er of light. Quite a Sells-family tradition, these thoughtfully punning names. The little love in my arms is my niece’s mom – my sister – the youngest of the three children in my family. From aunt to aunt, the story of my life.

Many years ago, as a child, I played in Chelsea Park, Manhattan, NYC. In those days, it was concrete with a little bit of green. Today, it’s green with a little bit of concrete. Somewhere in the middle, it was just sand, like a big cat litter box. I’m sure Chelsea Park could be a metaphor for life – from concrete jungle to cat dung to green space – but that is probably over-reading. My country and I have made it through Vietnam, the cold war, and into the next millennium. My country and I have have seen the World Trade Center fall and aRead More →

Ten things that made me happy today: 1. My niece (I broke the people law wherein gratitudes cannot include people, but this is actually a happiness list) 2. A nice dinner at Bistro Byronz for a good cause – “Dining Out for Life”; 3. I got away with an excellent joke on my boss’s boss’s boss; 4.My boss’s boss’s boss didn’t fire me for said excellent joke; 5. My house is clean; 6. Celestial Seasonings’ Gingerbread Spice Tea is out of production and off season, but I still have some left over; 7. I took a minute last week to re-string my twenty+ year oldRead More →

This year was peculiar at school because various calamities kept us in crisis mode all year. As we plod toward April, I find myself worn as thin as some of the most stressful times of my adult life even though nothing overly stressful stands on the horizon except for typical work responsibilities. Perhaps I could weather daily work more easily if the campus’s internal rhythm hadn’t been thrown off balance. I never stopped attending school, after K12 was college, after college was grad school, straight through to work, and here I remain. My body never adjusted to the normal ebb and flow of time thatRead More →

My cats are overweight, a problem common to aging pets and pet owners who spend too much time indoors at the computer or on the sofa watching television. My cats are on a diet, which causes Milo some serious problems. Milo is a large, lumbering cat of Siamese mix. He’s muscle, fat, size, and stealth. He’s all love, and all hunger, and like your typical Siamese cat, he’s a complete bully. The other cat, the lonesome Hank Williams, was a pariah in another life. He stands his ground, but only for so long. So Milo, whose full name should be Milosevic, muscles him out ofRead More →

Scandal is a guilty pleasure with its bodice-ripping, twisty-turny Shonda Rhimes storyline. Lauded in many circles as a positive image, Olivia Pope is a familiar tragic trope clad in a power suit. All the blogs say that audiences, particularly women of color, have a love/hate relationship with Olivia Pope, the main character of Scandal, because she’s a two-steps-forward, two-steps-back kinda girl. Olivia Pope is a “fixer” with a heart of gold. She worked on the President’s campaign, helping him earn office. The two fall in epic-level love, and have an ongoing interracial, extramarital affair, enacted physically and sustained emotionally, even when the physical component ceases.Read More →