Can I Call Myself a Writer by Marie Bonet It’s night time. I’m 14 years old. Brazil. The ocean breeze inebriates me. I like to read, write, and daydream. I have a best friend who also loves to write. We are inseparable at school. We start writing stories — mini-novels — just for fun. I write one chapter, she writes the next. Back and forth, and then we read what we wrote. We collect many notebooks filled with stories. We keep them in a box and take turns keeping them safe. --- It’s night time. I’m 18 years old. Brazil. The scent of textbooks lingers in the air. People talk. A bell rings. Exciting new things are happening — for both my friend and me. We go to different universities and take different paths. I still love to write. I venture into poetry and short stories. Compositions. I write and read them many times. My hand is sore from all the writing. No notebooks now — just loose sheets of paper. I don’t show them to anyone. I just put them in a drawer. --- It’s night time. I’m 28 y...

 Musings One day, while resting as I tried to recover from a nasty cold, I kept watching the big dog I was fostering. He was playing, and my mind started to wander, philosophizing as I often tend to do in my quiet moments. The dog was not fixed, you see, and the more I watched him, the more I got to thinking... Well, first, let me explain that, as a person who teaches anatomy and physiology and is used to talking about body parts and functions, it is natural for me to think about some things that the layperson may not think of all the time. I have a bit of a clinical eye, if you will. Plus, being me, this unorthodox, out-of-the-box type of thinking is actually not uncommon at all. So, please do not get offended by what is coming. Well then, as I watched my dog frolic around with his toy, I suddenly fixated on his testicles dangling and bouncing like happy golf balls. In my contemplative (and feverish) state, that got me thinking even more... Why in heck did nature create males with...