disability rights tagged posts

A little more than 40 years ago, I literally wandered into my first job out of college, a totally unplanned and unprepared for happenstance that nevertheless bequeathed to me a timely, early exposure to the whole faith-in-the-human-race idea that has helped sustain me ever since. A week ago, I met back up with some of the people from that job, most of whom I hadn’t seen since then, at a reunion that made the intervening 40 years seem like a short stroll we had all taken around the block to catch a breath of air.

The situation in the winter of 1973 was that my college counselor had miscounted my transcripts and I was one unit short of graduation that was looming just a few months hence...

Sex, eating, drinking and sleeping form a kind of Holy Quartet of what psychologists call “needs-based cognitions,” but the first of those is by far the most complicated in human life. For all its nearly non-stop saturation in our media, we remain profoundly conflicted about sex, not the least of those conflicts reflecting the vulnerability inherent to nakedness and our suspicion that surely other people—probably everyone else—gets more sex and is less conflicted about it than we are. (Aren’t you?)

These questions and conflicts (and their silliness) are brought into sharp relief with the issue of body image, that intense exposure of our “imperfections” to the gaze of another. (Halle Berry, you can stop reading now.) These imperfections, of course, involve more than just our physical selves but reach down to the core of our emotional imperfections as well...