When I was in my twenties, bartering in Cartagena in my clunky Spanish, a man told me that Colombians are Americans too. I was embarrased that I’d gotten caught in a lie about where I was from, but also that I’d never acknowledged that fact myself. I wrote a poem about that experience, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since the Benito Bowl and Bad Bunny’s reminder that America is more than just the US.
According to a study from the University of Minnesota’s Rural Health Research Center, even people with solid social networks experience loneliness across the Initiator Fellow Marcella Prokop is developing a social enterprise to combat rural loneliness through creativity and community connection.
Most of my life, poverty had been presented as a moral failure, a result of someone not wanting to work hard enough, or save enough, or some other such belief. As an adult I know better, and we as a society now know better. Learning how to change this belief is part of my definition of success as I get older.
For most of the fall semester, Cedar, my 7-year-old son, has been caught up in the 6-7 craze, where he and friends run around yelling "siiiix seeeveeen" for no apparent reason. The interwebs has told us it's fun for kids to do this because it means nothing and gets our adult goats so thoroughly. My son and his friends have confirmed this.