Recognizing manipulative patterns isn’t about attacking or labeling a parent. It’s about clarity. It’s about finally trusting your own emotional experience. As children, we adapt to survive emotionally. We learn to keep the peace. We become the responsible one. The quiet one. The overachiever. The mediator. Those strategies once protected us. But what protected you then may be exhausting you now. you are allowed to love someone while also deciding how much access they have to your peace. Today isn’t about confrontation. It’s about observation. Pay attention to how your body feels during interactions. Notice when guilt appears. Notice when your voice gets smaller. These signals are information — not evidence of weakness.

"A raw and relatable poem about a couple's fight for love and space in a challenging living situation, longing for freedom and a place to call their own."

A Lunatic Moon is a fictional tale of horror drama. A young man investigating the death of his close friend is accidentally infected by a rare and deadly virus. He is gradually overcome by the unusual and dangerous symptoms of this virus. Leaving himself, his family, and friends guessing what to do next. It is a race against time, as the police are also investigating, and every day is one day closer to another funeral.

A short tale from my youth. As I grew up in the country and kept friends in the city, I had many adventures at a time when digital technology was just surfacing in classrooms and entertainment. Yes, it was the 80's!

In this chapter, a fellow student of Danny's from Henry Paton High School is viciously murdered. Bell and Sam respond. Revulsion and confusion are the orders of the day.

This is a short poem about a discovery I made in the woods when I was young. It was frightening and stuck with me. I remember it as clear as the afternoon I came upon it. Not knowing what to do with the memory, I decided to turn it into a poem. To this day, I think about going back to find it again. Although that is many miles from where I live now.

A short poem about the loss of someone close using my own personal thoughts and feelings afer the loss of a very important person in my life.

This is another old one - but somehow still relevant I have been thinking about this topic for a long time and finally hit on a way to say it that expressed what I wanted to say. An Imperfect Metaphor I like cats. Note, I didn't mention dogs. In fact, I’m more of a dog person than I am a cat person. Saying I like cats doesn’t impact my feelings about dogs at all, despite it being a reality. Think they are fluffy adorable little murder machines and I enjoy cuddling them.

A Bad Moment I was lying on a thin mattress on the floor. The cupboards crawled with the glistening black shells of thousands of cockroaches. Had I turned on the light they would have scurried away, but there was no electricity in the apartment. I could see my breath, the place had electric heat. I was two blocks from the bridge. A few years earlier a friend of mine had jumped from that bridge, ending his life. I was considering doing the same thing. The only thing that saved me was knowing that my son would have to deal with that for the rest of his life.

"A raw and powerful poem about living with chronic pain, capturing the physical and emotional toll of an invisible war within one's own body." My body's war zone, a constant fight...

A word of caution — this piece gets pretty personal and discusses some themes around SA and DV, so if you don’t want to read that kind of thing, maybe skip it I grew up with hippies. Sometimes we were in housing co-ops, sometimes we were in communes (both urban and rural), sometimes we were homeless, sometimes we lived in regular apartments with a group of people, and occasionally we even lived in houses (mostly my dad).

I love poetry and writing but never knew I wanted to write myself, because I was scared of what others would think <3

Direct answer: Early on, many biologists treated sugars on proteins and lipids as “decorations” because they were hard to map, hard to sequence, and hard to connect to a clear function. The core problem was technical and conceptual: glycans are structurally diverse, branched, and not template-encoded as DNA and proteins are, so the field felt messy and slow-moving. (ACS Publications)

This short love story is about how a Bangladeshi-Canadian woman finds love in Korea, with a Korean man, and despite their cultural and ethnic differences, this short story is a reminder that no matter how big the barriers they have, their love will overcome them every step of the way. This is a Valentine's Day treat for all international K-Drama and K-POP fans out there.

Ray was a great guy. You wouldn’t know it if you met him. He’s an older man, homeless, a paranoid schizophrenic. Get him cornered indoors and he might be violent. Actually, it’s pretty likely. I don’t know if Ray is still alive. I haven’t seen him recently and the life expectancy for people like Ray tends to be low. I used to see him all the time.

This is a work of fiction. It uses real public controversies as atmosphere, not as proof. So, let us begin… I know how a jail smells when the night goes wrong. Cold bleach. Old sweat. Burnt coffee that sat too long on a hot plate. And that stale, damp odor that clings to concrete no matter how hard you scrub. You learn it in your first month, and it never leaves you. Years later, you can catch it on a stranger’s shirt in a grocery aisle, and your body tightens before your mind even places the memory. I did my time on the inside in South Carolina, at the state level, and then again down in Florida. County work. Not federal, but we still held prisoners for the Feds that had detainers. Still, a cell is a cell when the doors lock, and policy turns into habit, and habit turns into survival.

Will people still work if there’s a UBI in place? A long and pretentious thought experiment UBI and You There are a lot of common objections to the idea of a UBI and I’m going to try and address them over the next little while. This article is my first stab at it. The objection “People won’t work if you give them money for free”. I’m going to examine that idea and see if it holds up to scrutiny. Spoiler alert: not even a little.

I have a box full of broken boards. Some of those boards have blood on them. For years and years, I persevered, until I didn’t. On that day I failed. The boards are wrapped in lengths of cloth. I fought for those bits of cloth, I bled for them. Those bits of cloth are my belts. White, orange, green stripe, green, blue stripe, blue, red stripe, red, brown. These days brown would be black stripe, but back then it was brown. There is no black on that list.

Low taxes discourage spending while high taxes encourage it The Lie We All Believe It’s a common refrain today, more from the right than the left, but both are guilty of it. Lower taxes encourage growth. It’s also a lie.

When I got ADHD meds I lost the things that made me able to cope even with ADHD, now I am getting them back — they will help you as well This is another old piece - I haven't done as well as I thought I was going to when I wrote it In the Beginning Getting diagnosed with ADHD was a big deal, but it still took me a little bit to get meds. When I did it changed everything. I have never been good at getting back to work after being interrupted. Once I had my meds it was effortless. I could get into a fight with my girlfriend and drop back into coding without having resolved the fight. Previous me was so far from capable of that that it never even occurred to me it was possible for a human to do.