Doreen Michele

One of my best friends in highschool was Korean and taught me two sentences in Korean. I still remember one of them. Backwards engineering it gets me the latinized Neuneun yeppeuda which translates as You are pretty. My attempts to spell it nuh nun eepooda and similar were getting me You are a fool or Your eyes are big. Columbus, Georgia has a Korean American community and Korean restaurants and a Korean church. I had Korean friends in school. So did my older brother. I worked at Aflac in my forties. They were getting most of their money from Japan and the CEO spent one week or so out of every month in Japan. Gilbert Gottfried was the original voice of the Aflac duck in commercials and was fired after making jokes about Japan that Aflac felt was inappropriate following a disaster. We got internal emails with articles and some had tidbits about Japan. My two sons are longtime fans of Japanese media, including anime and video games. If you are American, you may have played Japanese games...

We bitch when white men write only about white male culture as that is exclusionary. We also bitch about cultural appropriation if they write about anything else. We also also bitch about how evil and terrible it is if other cultures feel forced to put their culture on display to try to make money. Apparently, nothing makes us happy. I speak for Doreen Michele Traylor, the little old lady I see staring back at me in the mirror. I have fantasies someday this will lead to real money. I'm incredibly bitter about making a good faith effort to do right and live right and blah blah blah blah blah and feeling shafted not just in spite of that but because of that. I've spent about twenty-five years learning to blog in a way that I feel is not a DISASTER. If you think you can do it better, fabulous. Hop to it.

I learned to read before I started kindergarten and I was in gifted programs of some type starting as early as first or second grade. In eighth grade, I took Algebra. That was advanced placement because it was typically offered starting in ninth grade. I probably took Geometry in ninth grade, Algebra II in tenth grade and Advanced Algebra - Trigonometry in eleventh grade. In eleventh grade at age sixteen, I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta. Those are the Greek letters for M A TH.  Mu Alpha Theta is a college level math honor society. You must be in college level math and maintain certain grades. I don't remember anymore if it's for just the math class or overall or both. Eleventh grade was the earliest you could be inducted at that time. Our chapter of Mu Alpha Theta at my high school tutored once a week I think. For an hour after school, anyone in our high school could drop by and get free help from one of the local math geeks. One girl was probably officially low IQ. No one e...

I currently have over three dozen topical blogs. I no longer have a personal blog per se, but this body of writing grows out of my point of view as an individual.  It grows out of my experiences as a military dependent growing up, as a military wife after I was an adult where life worked as long as I and my husband played our role as a cog in the military machine, and it grows out of me trying to make my life work post-divorce. I sometimes joke that the US military is like a communist country.  That isn't some kind of political criticism. It's just to say that while so many Americans struggle with the high cost of housing and trying to afford medical care, military members and their dependents get a lot of those basics covered by the military in a way that moves a lot of issues out of their way. As a military wife, I never had to wonder if I could afford to see a doctor or take my kids to see a doctor. I saw a doctor if I thought medical care was in order. Period. I didn't ...

At age twenty, it finally came out that I had gotten secretly married the year before and my husband had finally joined the military like he said he would and he would be starting basic training shortly.  I very suddenly had a job and an apartment almost immediately with minimal effort on my part after years of failing to arrange to move out on my own. My parents fixed me up with a job, helped me get an apartment and may have moved my furniture for me while I was at work.  Prior to that, I had been job hunting, without good results, having dropped out of college to avoid committing fraud on the financial aid forms my father filled out or inform him I was technically married. But I didn't know how to job hunt and no one was really helping me figure it out. In contrast, I got endless help with homework and establishing good study habits and my dad filled out the financial aid paperwork for college -- not all parents do that. I and a friend tried to come up with her tuition out o...

Uh, oh. I made a clean spot here. It's a cute scene in the movie Aliens with Ripley -- a mom whose child grew up and died while she was in deep sleep for space travel -- and Newt, a little girl and the only survivor of something terrible. Social stuff doesn't really work that way. If you participate in a sick system, no one accidentally ends up clean. I don't really need to tell you the Internet has deteriorated in my lifetime and efforts to monetize this cool futuristic thing is a huge part of why. We have words for that, including enshittification , and everyone knows common sayings like "If you aren't the customer, you're the product." I'm a big fan of Google. This site is hosted by one of their products and when the Internet was younger, AdSense probably worked well for some people. It never worked well for me. I never had adequate traffic to turn that into something resembling an adequate income for my work. I write about topics that are inherentl...