Six Word Photo Story Challenge: Freestyle — Love me? Lock and chain me! I am reading lots of books on the history of romantic love. Romantic love — as it’s been mystified, fictionalized and advertised in popular culture — has its roots in the patriarchal misogynistic romances of the middle ages and it is closely tied to power, ownership and jealousy. …

A fictionalized memoir — Grandma keeps telling grandpa his shirt is no good for this evening’s dinner party. She brings him a jade polo shirt and leaves it on the stairway for him. Grandpa is singing out loud while taking a shower. …

Six Word Photo Story Challenge: Freestyle — The cost of freedom is uncertainty. Are you a bird or a cat? Do you prefer to be free but lost and uncertain of where you’ll be tomorrow, what you’ll eat or whether you’ll be able to find a safe place to build a nest or do you prefer to be safe and sound and certain…

A short-form meditation — Thomas Nigel once wrote a paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat, to explain the phenomenological experience. As I’m writing this, my cat is prowling around deciding where to recline next: the beautiful life of a cat, no strings attached. Descartes has no friends, no love, no heartbroken…

An inspiration for gloomy days — It’s a grey day today. Snow is falling and a heavy fog has sunk down to suffocate the clear windows of my apartment. I feel sad and sullen. The lucky bamboo plant by the window is scraping through the fog like a ballerina (with a hunchback) or a question mark…

(From nonsense to sense: a lesson in free-writing ) — Today I just want to be myself. Today, instead of sitting here at my desk, staring at the white screen and contemplating on what to write and how to write it, I just want to free write here and I don’t care if the form and the content won’t fit…

How to “unlearn” an old habit and free your creative mind — All of us, writers, creators, and general enthusiasts have probably experienced by now that unleashing the creative power — the artist inside us — is not an easy task. In fact, it can be a strenuous lifetime project for some. If you’re like me, a left-brain dominant (as they say)…