What Have You Been Learning Lately?

Roundabout or straight through? As a noun, a bypass is a road that passes around, rather than through, a city. You can also receive a coronary bypass, wherein a vein or an artery from elsewhere in your body is grafted to your heart to create an open channel for blood flow when one of your coronary arteries becomes blocked. As a verb, to bypass describes personal behavioral decisions: go past or around, avoid, evade, dodge, escape, elude, sidestep, shortcut. Choosing to circumnavigate something rather than go straight through the center of it can be pragmatic (i.e. The Fire Swamp with its quick sand and R.O.U.S.). It can also indicate fearful avoidance. Are you being intelligent or cowardly? Thoughtful or weak? What motivation lies beneath your course of action? There are places we may never want to go, towns to which we may never want to return. We would drive 100 miles out of our way to avoid catching so much as a glimpse of the skyline. No matter how far, deep and wild our trav

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself. When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet

When you tell someone that you're taking pole dancing classes, there are a few, almost guaranteed reactions: a raised eyebrow, a wry, judgey smile and the question, "That's a really good workout, right?" It is. I could barely raise my arms after my first two classes. After the next two, my abs and legs and...well, everything...were sore in a profound way for days. I hadn't worked like that in a long time. It made me feel strong and healthy. It's interesting to me that the only permissible reason to take a pole class seems to be for the exercise. When I approached this experiment it was because I had taken some turns around the pole at my friend's studio,  Evolve , and it stirred something deep within me. I spent a lot of my life feeling awkward in my skin, only feeling sexy in the presence of someone mirroring that back to me. And even then, it always came as a surprise that anyone saw me that way. Alone with the pole at Evolve, I watched myself move