Last Saturday I attended a production of Our Country's Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker at The Chapin School on Manhattan's Upper East Side. I worked with students at this private, all-girls school last year around this time, when my former student and now colleague Sarah Bellantoni asked me to work with her to create an ethnodrama with her students. The experience of making that play was one of the highlights of 2015 for me, so I was excited to see this year's production.

About a month ago, I shut off my cable television. I was tired of paying way too much money for way too many channels that I was barely watching. And when I was watching, I often found myself sucked into the 24-hour news cycle, and that was literally bad news. I wasn't sleeping well from all the broadcast sturm und drang, and that cable bill was jacking up my credit card debt for no good reason. I decided to try and survive without cable television. Now I have a digital antennae that barely works, and I get almost no channels. My evenings consist of watching very old episodes of "Let's Make a Deal" with Monty Hall on the Buzzr channel, which somehow comes through loud and clear.

Claire and Steve find themselves in the hospital after Julia's episode, and Claire begins to reveal the root cause their difficulties.

I like to run in the snow. And I mean while it's snowing. Call me crazy. Call me reckless. Call me whatever you want. There's something about running through snow that appeals to me. I hope for the opportunity at least once each winter, and it came this morning.
 

Writing anything for me is difficult, because I have a really loud inner censor that screams, "That's shit!" a lot of the time as I write. That voice sometimes yells at every sentence. It even happens when I write for this blog. I've gotten better at ignoring that censor voice on here and in my creative writing. Now I wait until it's all out of me, and then I declare out loud that what I've written is shit. Some would argue that it's just as bad, but at least I'm letting the ideas flow.