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Recently, my work space has shifted, and I'm finding it's affecting me much more than I anticipated. Previously, I had been in a large team room with one other person, and we had control over the lighting in the room. As we both have issues with light sensitivity, this meant that the overhead lights were off most of the time. Additionally, the team room was in an out of the way corner, so there weren't many people who would drop by just to chat. It was a lovely space. Now, my desk is in essentially the opposite of all of that. I'm in a cubicle surrounded by other people, many of whom are quite gregarious. I have no control over the lighting, and there are overhead lights in addition to two bit windows; as it's getting to be late spring/early summer in the Pacific Northwest, this means a fair amount of sun. It's definitely been an adjustment. One thing that I noticed is that being in such an open space, having so many people around and near-constant interacti

I watched a video the other day that made me think. (Dangerous, I know.) One part of the argument being made was that it's not right to lump language that incites violence into the same category as language that hurts people emotionally, because it decreases the value of the words that incite violence. It took a little while for me to pick out why I didn't feel comfortable with that, but I think I have a handle on it now. I was not a popular child. I read novels when I was six; had glasses when I was five (which, might I add, was in 1986, at the height of the  Sally Jesse Raphael  fad of glasses); and I never quite figured out that just because I knew something, it didn't mean that I had to tell everyone about it. I got teased a lot, is what I'm saying. A lot of the insults rolled off my back, partly because I didn't see them as insults. OK, so I'm the teacher's pet - I can't argue with that, I frequently talk to the teachers after class about anythi

Surprising absolutely no one, I was a theater kid growing up. I think I heard my first musical when I was about 11 or 12, and I never looked back. In 1996, the musical that all the theater kids fell in love with was Jonathan Larson's Rent . As a kid growing up on military bases for the US and passing for white, I admit that I didn't really get a lot of the themes of the musical when I first heard it. It didn't keep me from listening to it over and over, memorizing the lyrics of "La Vie Boheme" even though I didn't understand all of the references. It was the show everyone was talking about. This past weekend, I came across the movie of the musical that was released in 2005. I'd seen the show performed once in a theater, but never watched the movie, and so I decided to take a look. The first thing that hit me was how many of the lyrics I still remembered - it's probably been at least 15 years since I've listened to the cast recording, but ther