You are currently browsing the The Mark of Ashen Wings weblog archives for May, 2008.

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What Money Buys Besides Stuff

drupagliassotti @ May 31, 2008 # One Comment

Yesterday I took a long evening walk, deciding to follow a nearby street to wherever it dead-ended in the scrubby mountains that surround the area where I live right now.
The street took me out of my apartment complex beside a series of strip malls and into the rarified air of remote, high-income estates. The median […]

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Cheat Death. Enjoy Life Now.

drupagliassotti @ May 30, 2008 # No Comment Yet

Is it better to save for a retirement at age 50 or beyond or to take a series of mini-retirements throughout your life? Over at Get Rich Slowly, J.D. wrote a post about mini-retirements that includes an interview with Timothy Ferriss that got me thinking about how I approach my own life.
Many personal finance […]

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My Quest for Quiet

drupagliassotti @ May 29, 2008 # 2 Comments

Sartre said “Hell is other people,” and I often agree with him, particularly in crowded malls around Christmastime and when my Neighbors of the Perpetual Laundry are running their machines after 11 at night or at 5 in the morning. I may be one of the few people on earth who’s deliberately trying to […]

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Writing Update

drupagliassotti @ May 26, 2008 # No Comment Yet

Just figured I’d provide a quick update here —
Fiction: I’m still working on the umpteenth draft of King’s Monster. At the moment, it’s going slowly because of my nonfiction writing commitments, but I’m hoping that after my Big Bad Deadline of July 3-4, I might be able to settle into it more comfortably. I’ve […]

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Predictably Irrational

drupagliassotti @ May 24, 2008 # No Comment Yet

Predictably Irrational (2008) by Dan Ariely ought to be required reading. Period.
At first I considered saying “for students” or “for investors,” but what Ariely’s experiments in economic behaviorism show us is how easily our minds and emotions are swayed, and his findings not only have relevance for financial decisions and policy but also for […]

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An Old Friend of the Family Returns

drupagliassotti @ May 22, 2008 # No Comment Yet

I don’t remember exactly when Mom created “Alien Artifact” (more affectionately known to my sister and me as “Artifact” and to Mom’s friend Carol as “Arty”), but he’s been in the family since at least 1980 — I have photos from our time in Italy that shows Artifact looking regally over the family and our […]

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Viral Story

drupagliassotti @ May 20, 2008 # No Comment Yet

(I quickly whipped this up for a friend over at LJ who tagged me with “make up a fictional memory about us.” Since it’s fiction, I figured I might as well post it here on my writing blog…!)
I don’t really like to think too much about that night. We were drinking too hard, Coz, you, […]

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Call for Papers: Boys’ Love Anthology

drupagliassotti @ May 19, 2008 # No Comment Yet

CALL FOR PAPERS
Girls Doing Boys Doing Boys:
Japanese Boys’ Love Anime and Manga in a Globalized World
Edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, & Dru Pagliassotti

This edited, interdisciplinary volume seeks to examine the new representations of same-sex attracted males in boys’ love and/or yaoi — that is, male same-sex romance or erotica as featured in […]

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On (Not) Keeping Up with Old Friends

drupagliassotti @ May 18, 2008 # One Comment

This afternoon I received an email from an old high school acquaintance taking me to task for ignoring her previous messages: “I have gathered by your lack of response to my previous emails that you do not wish to keep in touch with me,” she wrote. My first reaction was, “lack of response?” And then, […]

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The Trouble with Clotheslines

drupagliassotti @ May 17, 2008 # No Comment Yet

Trent, over at The Simple Dollar, wrote about his and his wife’s decision not to use a clothesline, even though they’d like to and it would be better for their pocketbooks and the environment than running the dryer.
The thought of putting out a clothesline had crossed my mind after moving into my new apartment, too. […]

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