I've always had an uneasy relationship with pronouns. When I was a teen-ager, somebody taught me how to use them. She sat me on a chair next to a pillow and told me to talk to the pillow about how I felt. Instead, I pretended I was the pillow and I told Sheila, "She feels this. She feels that." We began again, (and again and again). But every time I tried to say, " I feel," I first became angry, and then, if I worked through it, experienced a floating sensation, growing strangely disconnected from my body, as if I were dangling in the air above my own head. So Sheila rubbed my back gently and...

Last night, I had a dream about Howard Street. When I was growing up in Chicago's East Rogers Park, Howard Street was the edge of the known universe. That was where the neighborhood changed and white people didn't venture. The Chicago of my youth was a segregated city, as divided as the deep south. Some neighborhoods were black, some were white, and some were "other." Very few were racially mixed. In my dream, I was walking along the beach near Howard Street alone late at night. I wanted to hurry because it seemed dangerous. But the more quickly I tried to walk, the heavier I felt. My feet...

[Cross-posted from the Rio Arriba Community Health Council Blog. ] Recently, after months of silence, New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez became one of several Republicans to blur the Right's anti-socialist line in the sand by adopting Medicaid expansion. As New Mexico is surpassed only by Texas in its ranks of uninsured, and leads almost every list of scary medical conditions known to humanity, adding 170,000 insured out of a population of 2,000,000 is obviously good for our statewide health. But health wasn't the primary reason Martinez bucked her party. Her decision is rooted in New Mexico...