Tag What’s on Your Mind?

Without You, I’m Not Me

My dad used to play piano and occasionally sing in a band at the Colorado Opry. He started when I was about a year old. My mom would bring me to the show every night. On most nights, I would wiggle my way down the stairs to the front row so that I could see him up close. On the last song, Dad would always pick me up on the

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Thanksgiving at Maokong

It’s the last Thursday of November, and I’ve signed up for Thanksgiving lunch at Maokong, the major tea-producing area of Taipei located in the rugged foothills southeast of the city. I stuff the direction sheet into my shoulder bag and start the ten-minute jaunt from the Taipei Royalty apartment building at 9:30 to the Liuzhangli stop on Taipei’s Metro Rapid Transit (MRT) Brown Line. The last station at Taipei Zoo

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Flaring Up: The Very Real Threat of Coronal Mass Ejections

Humanity is facing an inevitable catastrophe that world leaders continue to ignore due mostly to indifference and blind ignorance. This means that the public and scientific community need to more proactively address the issue to avert disaster. Specifically, many don’t even realize that on July 23rd, 2012, a massive solar storm of two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) barely missed Earth. Had the CMEs arrived one week earlier, they would have

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Ray

“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” Ray dutifully reminded himself as he watched his left shoe, and then his right shoe, pass each other on the sidewalk below, looking from his vantage point like compact autos negotiating a tiny two-lane road. If one could even call it that, given a buckling surface strewn with cigarette butts and used tissue papers and rubble – were it a road, heaven

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The Nicoya Peninsula: One of the World’s Blue Zones

If only more people knew about Blue Zones. When my mother was a young girl in Mexico, she had problems with her digestive system. Around the age of 12, she was hospitalized multiple times because of sharp pains in her abdominal area. As a result, she stopped eating, and her sickness increased. The doctors never found the origin of her pain, and she fought the discomfort for many years. After

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Physical Abuse: A Silent Tragedy throughout America

Here’s a story about six young people from not so long ago who lived in a town called Freeport and dealt with physical abuse in various ways. Paul Henry was 12 years-old, a dreamy, quick-footed kid from a large family of all sisters and no father. He was walking home one evening in October from a friend’s house. It was dark already, the trees bare, the streets shiny black from

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