Theoretically informed memoirist punching midlife in the gut.
My article was published in TIME Magazine! Here it is, actually in print (only) and on shelves across the nation between April 12 and July 12, 2021. I had a friend say she saw the issue at an airport. I mean, come on!
Read More I’m a ‘real’ writer!It will serve as a reminder to me, for now, and to Ava as she grows old enough to understand, that we must endure what we think we cannot, that we must still believe even when we want to give up, that we must be present often enough to feel the purity of gratitude, and that there is immense love and power in the sharing of HOPE.
Read More When Hope is Shared(Originally written April, 2016) In the spirit of subtle non-conformity, this evening I eagerly attended the Mad Science with Mom event at school with my daughter – a Mother-Son event. We arrived to an auditorium full of rambunctious elementary-aged boys puddled together hyperactively cross-legged on the floor making a mess of pizza and absently spilling […]
Read More Science with Mad Mom(Originally written in April, 2012) Hanging out in Paris with Jim is like stomping through a Parisian Smurf village destroying centuries-old mushroom houses with a rolling keg of beer. The French are all running around in their scarves and tight pants, sipping wine and coffee out of pinky cups. They pack themselves like cigarettes next […]
Read More How Gay Paris is with Jim(Originally written in July, 2012) It’s nearly midnight on a Thursday in the abandoned convention center area in Downtown San Jose. Streets are blocked off in all directions – barricades, orange cones and police officers keeping the peace. Traffic signals are ignored as six-thousand “motivated” people fill the streets in a Tony Robbins trance chanting […]
Read More Why You Should Never Listen to Tony RobbinsWhen two of my friends and co-workers, Kim and Tina, asked if I felt safe walking to my car at night by myself in an affluent La Jolla neighborhood at the end of our evening out, I actually said, “Look around! There’s nothing but rich white people!” Yep. It came right out of my stupid […]
Read More The Unwitting American RacistWith five-sixths of Americans never taking an American history course after high school, it is no wonder that this has been the normalized collective ethos in the United States that has created a blinding hegemonic national value system willing to omit anything from our sorted history that threatens American exceptionalism, and more to the point, that threatens the power and control of the White, Christian patriarchy. As a result, the U.S. has “the largest gap of any country in the world between what historians know and what the rest of us are taught.” Now there’s something to be proud of.
Read More Manufactured Moral Panic: How critical race theory is weaponizing K-12 parentsCreativity is not simply art; and logic is not simply math. Our lives, and solutions to our problems, do not start at A and move in a straight line to a blissful ‘Destination Z.’ In fact, if we try to move through life that way—forcing straight lines out of curves—we are merely living as static 2-D cardboard cutouts positioned in the extended-arm strain of a Steinholding competition. Relax. Take a sip. Germany has been wrong about some things.
Read More The Myth of Going From A to ZBack when I had the luxury of sitting on my shrink’s second-hand couch in her excessively white office, a box of tissues in arm’s reach next to a clock tracking each of the fifty minutes, she would ask me to close my eyes and think of my safe place. She’d say it could also be […]
Read More Home in a BasketDear Baby Girl, You said that what you see happening in our country makes you sad. You are 12 years old now, my love.You know that Santa Clause isn’t real, and now I have to tell you the truth about America.One nation under God indivisible with liberty and just for all, isn’t real either. You […]
Read More A Letter to My Daughter: We can be better than what you seeToo depressed to get dressed, she threw on a pair of dirty yoga pants and kept the tank top on that she slept in, which she had also worn the day before. As she rubbed a raging headache, leftover from the marital spat the night before, she felt like just another failing, frumpy mom-wife with […]
Read More At What Age do Girls Learn to Hate Themselves?On the last lap, we were running in the rain. Laughing. She’s faster than me. The rain quickened her pace. I ran, momentarily alone, the windblown rain pelting my face, soaking my clothes, squinting my eyes, until they closed. Running blind. I didn’t want to open them. I wanted to keep running, looking up, blind, rain weighting my hair down, dripping off my nose and chin. Nature. Is. Bigger. Than. Us.
This is not an injustice. It is a surrender.
Free.
Read More A Rainbow in the RainTherapy = boundaries = impervious to sharp objects.
Read More How to be Impervious to Sharp ObjectsI wasn’t sure if I was annoyed by her or impressed by her. When I offered up that I was getting my degree in Astrophysics, as an obviously older student, her immediate response was, “Wow, don’t you have to be smart for that?”
It’s confirmed. I’m annoyed by her.
Read More Astrophysics? Don’t You Have to be Smart for That?You can prepare and train as much as possible, but you can never be totally ready for the hardest things you aim to achieve, especially when it’s a path you’ve never taken. That’s when you put your default anger setting to good use.
Read More The Angry Optimist
Shannon Master 