My argument: plain doesn’t preclude packing with flavor.It reminds me of a high school classmate’s overly done yearbook quote –compliments to Einstein, “simplify, simplify, simplify.”Exhibit A: On a roomy flight back to VT, I sit a seat over from the once chef to Jacob Javits (former Senator of New York).  We discuss cooking; he props his elbow on the armrest, leans in toward me, and with an air of gravity –as if he’s about to divulge the arcane whereabouts of the lost Arc...

Some people look forward to March because it means Madness –basketball that is, others await the seminal seedlings of spring, but for me it’s a harbinger to the eight days of masticating matzoh. It gets stale.  Although the days begin to lengthen, it is at this time that I find myself most susceptible to Seasonal Affective Disorder.  In early March the Manischewitz items begin to cluster at the fringes of aisles. But this year, I may not be so dour.  If Zaidy's truly is, as...

My neighbors are Greek.  Their protected names are Alex and Harice.  They shuffle along the edges of eighty.I am cleaning out my Grandma’s gutter –she passed away four months ago –which hadn’t been cleaned in years, when my other neighbors –a gay couple across the street –offer me a leaf blower “id-uhl goweh mutch fast-irh we-ith this,” he tells me.  He’s from Arkansas.  True to his word, everything is going great until I get to the gutter on the...

           What is the difference between self-consciousness and self-awareness?  Can we entwine the two strands into a double helical structure that make the positive and negative connotations less discernible?  How can we say that the former can’t induce the latter through a trickling prickle of fear titrated slowly enough that the side effects don’t overwhelm the subject?            It isn’t...

"What interests you?"  He asked.  In all honesty, the boy can't actually recall his exact words; it is an educated approximation.A little alarmed that the person sitting next to her hands-on-admirer had broken from his stupor of silence and entered into her auditory ingress of awareness, not through a staggering presence but rather because the fluctuations of his sound, which had been up until that point closemouthed, triggered the hammer to hit the anvil, creating...

Part I  This is a not really fictional piece of my crush on a particular girl who coincidentally and inconveniently has a boyfriend. FYI, I am, for the most part, the he/him/his (rarely does it actually work to conceal one's identity through fiction) but I am unsure who the narrator is.Why is it that the chapter in The Brothers Karamazov, "The Grand Inquisitor", a chapter addressing the innate evil of human kind, is robbed of its context, the umbilical cord severed from its origins and...