Top Shelf Ink

Note taking is practically mandatory if you want to be successful in college and, unfortunately, most professors expect that students learned how to take notes in high school. However, in reality, very few freshman are effective note takers. The skill is simply not emphasized enough at the high school level. As a result, many college students use voice recorders to capture their instructor’s lectures, but depending on playback alone is a recipe for disaster. It’s too easy to let your mind wander when you listen to the playback, and one technological malfunction could erase the whole lecture. (more…)

“I don’t know what my purpose is now,” my 83-year-old father told me a few weeks after my mom passed away. Fighting cancer and taking chemo, already in the early stages of dementia, he had managed to hold it together to take care of her for as long as she needed him. And she had needed him for 64 years.

Now, he seems to have let go. The dementia has multiplied exponentially, and there are days we have to tell him Mamma’s gone. It’s like he’s finding out for the first time, and the pain is terrible.  I think alot about that day he sat on my deck and told me he didn’t have a purpose anymore. (more…)

Like the commercial says, “Life comes at you fast.” Take tonight for example. My seventeen-year-old daughter comes in my bedroom and very casually says, “Hey, did you see on the national news this week that a kid at my high school was arrested Tuesday for bringing a gun to school? No, actually, I hadn’t seen that. And why was I just now hearing it from her? Well, because she’s seventeen, and she tells me things when she thinks about them. They usually come in the order of importance to her:  Boyfriend News, Dance Team News, Shopping Adventure News, Grades and Teacher News and, oh yeah, The Kid that Sits Next To Me in Economics Was Arrested for Having a Gun Shoved in His Pants News. Literally. This boy sits beside her in their economics class and on the day he was arrested for having a 9mm shoved into his waistband, there he was, sitting beside my daughter.  Gossiping, flirting. Doing the things teenage boys do at school, all the while with the cold steel of a gun pressed against his belly.

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