Reschool Yourself

It’s December 7th, and for most of us it’s just another day. But for my grandpa Bill, my mom’s father, it is “a day which will live in infamy.” This is how President Franklin D. Roosevelt described the day on which Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor on a quiet Sunday morning in 1941.
Recently, I [...]

This is Chapter 3 of a story about Reschool Yourself that I wrote for a GoodReads.com contest, which asked for a story written in a  24-hour period purely in status update form. Each line could be only up to 140 characters, though I’ve edited slightly here for readability. Chapter 1 gave a background on the [...]

At the moment, I’m feeling truly annoyed at myself. I haven’t posted to the blog for over three weeks, so now that I’m sitting down to do so, I have a lot to say. It’s going to take a long time. It would have been better to break this long update into smaller ones along [...]

I’ve recently had a couple of really good weekends. I did a lot of things that I enjoyed, like play music and cook. Most importantly, I mostly stayed away from the Internet.
Like many of us, I rely on the Internet every day, and I don’t know how I’d survive without it. But it also makes [...]

Since I got back from a six-day, cross-country trip on Tuesday, I’ve been craving the open road. Last week Darren and I left my hometown of Sonoma, California, and drove my Jetta and most of my belongings to my new home in Jackson, Mississippi. Each day of the trip was so exciting that it’s felt [...]

My mom has close to a hundred personal narratives sitting in dusty binders at home. I didn’t even know that she had even written them, over a decade ago for a friend sick with cancer, but one day I came across them and began reading. Every one resonated with an experience that I’d had and [...]

“I am way out of my league,” I thought as I walked into the lobby of Jackson’s New Stage Theatre this afternoon to audition for the musical Smokey Joe’s Cafe. This thought was only reinforced as I filled out the bright yellow form that I’d gotten from Chris, the theater’s friendly Education Director.
List previous acting [...]

As much as I curse the Information Age for gluing me to a computer screen all day, every day, I must also praise it for democratizing learning. Never before has information been so accessible to those of us lucky enough to live in countries with Internet access. Even those without Internet at home can use [...]

This morning, as usual, Darren and I rolled out to a coffee shop and had our official morning meeting (”Darren?” “Present.” “Melia?” “Present.”). We got to work on our laptops, and around 11:15 a.m., Darren pulled out his phone to read a text message.
Darren: Hey, want to talk about Reschool Yourself on the radio?
Melia: Umm…sure! [...]

Today Darren introduced me to a whole new world: the business of screen printing, otherwise known as silk screening. He learned the craft as a Graphic Design major in college and has designed and printed hundreds of his own t-shirts by hand. During my last visit in August, he designed a shirt for my grandpa’s [...]