I didn’t know where it came from. I was ambling along towards the school about three weeks before the end of the summer term of my final year. It was the day of my eighteenth birthday, the sun was shining, the skies were blue; and I really didn’t want to be stuck in a classro...
or that I disagree with what she was saying. I wanted to know what I was missing. What I was doing wrong so I could fix it. So I could be thinner and smaller and under 200 pounds for the first time since middle school.
In the evenings, my niece, my sister-in-law and her mother, and I tried Chinese brush painting for the first time. We taught ourselves how to grind the ink, which is pressed into sticks and colorful rectangles, and mix it with water in an ink stone. Then we practiced brush strokes an...