Essay on the Super Bowl for writing about sports. It is almost shocking the degree to which I have lost interest in baseball, college basketball and football, passions of my youth. Time, I guess, time. If only to have more of it. What do you think? Nathan Bell Super Bowl as Ritual Pizza, wings, beer, chips, hot dogs, burgers, commercials, football- these, the components of an American ritual. The Super Bowl is no game, it is a happening. It is a rare moment when America's gears grate to a halt. When the franticness and isolation that seem such a [View Full Entry]

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4) Olive Outside a bar under A green Heineken umbrella, An old woman, Tattered purple coat. Sunglasses and a gray hat. I am back in Nyack. My year in India is over. So is the covert love affair. I can't think of India or Sahaya Mary; I cannot bear their loss. Up Main Street past the bar and The drifter alone at the table. "Come here," she soothes. "You have a story to tell." I sit and tell her how I would have married Sahaya Mary, I Really would have And lived in India And spoken Tamil And had meaning And [View Full Entry]

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Hey, whoever still gets this and has taken the time to click on the link in the email they received. I had never written a poem until a few months ago. I had always been put off by the extravagant symbols alluding to the unknown. But in my senior seminar I have to write 25 pages of creative work, and since we are reading essays about poetry in this first section of the class, I decided I'd give poetry a whirl. Here are my first three. 1) A Tree, A Bird, Wind. A tree, A bird, Wind. To love A woman, [View Full Entry]

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Barack Obama has a heart. That is what this election is about. For once, people have been provided an alternative to the “best of the worst” scenario that seems to inevitably accompany each election cycle. Barack Obama has given the world reason to believe that if he were to be elected, the most powerful country in the world would be steered by someone who would look at a situation, say the genocide in Rwanda, and try to do the right thing. Saying that Obama is special because he has a heart and wants to do the right thing implicitly indicts politicians [View Full Entry]

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I know I haven't sent anything in a long while. It's been a whale of a semester. So much change, so much growth... why does growing seem to always hurt so much? Here is an essay for public essay One night a couple of weeks ago, I made an emergency beer run to Tops. I had never been to Tops before, and so after grabbing the beer and returning to the front to pay, I was shocked to find that none of the check out lines were open. There were no cashiers, there were no customers, there were no high schoolers [View Full Entry]

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Hey anyone who still gets this. Its been a busy summer and we finished the first draft of the book. And before school started as we had hoped. Now, we are working on the second draft and it is coming well. I wrote this little piece as an informal assignment for public essay class. Since Ive begun writing I have been slightly scared of writing about soccer. I don't know why. I think, most likely, I was worried that writing about soccer, something so important to me, wouldnt resonate. I know that I have been put off from writing about it [View Full Entry]

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Hey all, Here is an essay that I just wrote (and have yet to revise), looking at my experience with Sahaya Mary from a different, and for me, more powerful perspective. I know there should be some comments on this one. Happy summer to all. Hope everyone is doing well, Nate Essay for Guideposts A couple of times a year, often when I'm home from school, my mom and I wind up reminiscing about my childhood. "I'm sorry for all the anguish I caused you," the conversation usually starts, often over a plate of rice and beans in San Juan Cafe, [View Full Entry]

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It was through soccer, as usual, that I made my first connections in India. And, as usual, I had brought a soccer ball with me, this time deflated in my stuffed bag. I pumped it up with the help of a neighborhood bike repairman. He set up shop in the spotty shade of a scraggy bush next to the main road, sitting on a rock until a customer came. With a newly full ball in tow, I walked through my immediate neighborhood of mud huts and cement houses juggling the ball in the air, hoping to initiate some sort of interaction. [View Full Entry]

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There is a little boy with straight hair as blond as the sun bleached sand alone in the center of a small, tunnel-like backyard. The faint dusk light sends his shadow arching along the ground behind him. He bends down to the ground and scoops up a muddy gray baseball with the oversized glove his father gave him for Christmas. He stands slowly, tiredly, and faces the black trampoline pitch-back. It glares back at him from the shadows. A white strike zone was once painted onto it but now, after years of abuse, only faint splashes of paint dot the black [View Full Entry]

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A pale light seeped into the cramped bedroom from under the door. There was just enough light for John to see Patricia's pale, drawn face, if he were to have looked. But John didn't look. John stood stiffly in the middle of the room, hands on the back of his desk chair, staring out the window into the blackness. "What are we going to do now?" he asked. After a moment, Patricia, nearly hidden beneath the comforter said, "I don't know. I don't want this to happen any more than you do." John turned around slowly and stood facing the bed. [View Full Entry]

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