Category Archives: bio

about me, bio

Learning to Scuba Dive

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During one of my winter vacations from Woodstock, when my dad and stepmother were living in Bangkok, my dad and I did a scuba diving course. Dad had started diving during our year in Hawaii (1966), and I’d been hearing his stories about it for as long as I could remember. Getting certified together sounded like a fun father-daughter activity, and it was.

Our instructor was “Dusty” Rhodes, who had served with distinction in the US Navy during the Vietnam war, and had then settled in Thailand. I did not realize until years later that the preparation he gave us went far beyond typical scuba instruction.

"Dusty" Rhodes, an older man with gray hair, wearing a slouchy, faded blue cap with a bill and an orange diving vest with an inflation tube going over his shoulder. someone off camera is gesturing towards him with a small knife (no, it was not a threat)
Dusty Rhodes
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about me, bio

Memorabilia: The Little Man in the Boxes

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In my many moves around the world, I have brought with me a few items that remind me of specific times, places, people, and adventures in my life. This painting is one such.

While we lived in Thailand, my parents acquired some interesting pieces of original and local art, which moved with us and formed a familiar backdrop to our homes from Bangkok to Pittsburgh to Connecticut. We did not take much when we moved to Bangladesh in 1976, most of it went into storage. Sometime while I was attending the University of Texas at Austin, our household goods were moved from storage in Connecticut to my aunt’s property in Texas, where our old dishware may still be languishing in a disused falling-down barn full of rattlesnakes. I later rescued a few items, including the above which had been painted by our family friend Irma, an artist who owned a Scandinavian design shop in Bangkok.

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My Quilt

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One of my favorite teachers at Woodstock School was Kathleen Forance, our art teacher. I had long been as much of an artist as I could manage , mostly drawing and coloring. Kathleen got me into textile arts: embroidery, batik, weaving.

My first experiments in embroidery included small scenes from my own life (or my imagined life). In perhaps the very first, I showed myself in bed under a multicolored quilt. That was my inspiration to make a quilt.

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7 Horrifying Facts About Chemotherapy

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I originally wrote this in January 2016 and submitted it to Cracked.com, which I was greatly enjoying at the time. Never heard back from them, so here it is.

There are about a bazillion different types of cancer. Not all of them require or even benefit from chemotherapy, but, when we hear “cancer”, chemo is what we tend to immediately think of, and fear the most. Except, of course, dying.

I have “difficult” breasts, and I’ve had cancer scares before. Each time, the most frightening possible outcome, to me, was chemo (yes, chemo scared me more than death). My nightmare finally came true: in late 2014 I was diagnosed with breast cancer requiring surgery and then chemotherapy (followed by radiation and hormonal therapy).

While chemotherapy may well save my life (we’ll get to that), it has proved in some ways to be almost as bad as I’d feared – and, in other ways, even worse. 

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Women in Tech and the 2016 US election

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Note: This piece was originally drafted in March 2017, but for some reason I never got around to publishing it. If Kamala Harris does become the Democratic candidate this year, everything I wrote back then will be even more true – and worse with the racism that will accompany it.

The US election was taking a toll on women even before its hideous denouement last November.

The constant, blatant misogyny against Hillary expressed by both left and right was exhausting. We could see ourselves in her: working harder, being more prepared, having done all her homework (and everyone else’s) yet being judged on her hair, her makeup, her clothing. Being told she was too shrill, too combative, too much like someone’s mother. Not nice enough.

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