Ann E. Michael's Blog

I don’t usually write about food, other than what I’ve been growing in my garden, although on my trip to eastern Turkey I tasted some dishes totally new to me (such as hangel, yogurt soup, and dondurma, all of which were delicious). And this past weekend, in New York City, I had a Colombian stew […]

Numerous so-called health and fitness articles continually pop up on my screen, and many of them not only tout the benefits of walking but claim to know how many minutes or miles of walking (or rate of speed and such) are necessary to ward off dementia, keep your heart healthy, your bones in shape, your […]

I heard about Laika, the first dog in space, many years ago when I was a child; but on a recent visit to The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, CA, I learned more about the early space programs in the USSR and the USA and the (mis)treatment of animals chosen for experimental flights. […]

Zeugma, an ancient city in what is now Türkiye’s Gaziantep Province, is near where we began our tour of a 2000-km section of the Silk Road trade route. The city’s name comes from the ancient Greek word for “bridge,” (it means to join or yoke together); the city was located on the Euphrates, where there […]

At Şanlıurfa in the Urfa region, a Kurdish area in eastern Turkey, we stayed two nights after our visit to two amazing, ancient monuments that are really out in the middle of nowhere: Mt Nemrut Dağ (the tomb of Antiochus I) and Göbekli Tepe, a Neolithic site of the Stone Mound Culture, both Unesco World […]

At my daughter’s suggestion, we ended up in Mesopotamia: central to eastern Turkey, fertile crescent, Euphrates and Tigris, vaguely following the borders of Syria, Iran, and Armenia up toward the Caucasus to Kars. It was, indeed, quite an adventure. We were booked on a tour following a section of the storied Silk Road through Wild […]

The weather here has been hot and somewhat humid, though it continues to be dry–much drier than autumns used to be. Drought extending past August into October is becoming a more usual thing, according to my garden journal. One plant that thrives this time of year is tithonia (Mexican sunflower), and it attracts monarch butterflies […]

I ran across something online that made me shudder–and it wasn’t politics or global tragedies but something sillier and more personal. Apparently there was a trend a decade ago of adults reading their adolescent diaries, aloud, in public (see “Mortified”). Ugh. The few times I have been tempted to read any of my old diaries […]

Reading Proust again returned me to some of my own past reflections on memory and self, the capital-S Self. A decade or so ago I spent considerable time reading in philosophy, physics, and neuroscience in an endeavor to get a grip on human consciousness and, perhaps, behavior. I posted about some of these texts on […]

Lately, I’ve been experimenting again with prose poems and with very short poems that are not quite tanka or haiku, but not much longer. Six to ten lines. Short lines. Then, the online journal Six Sentences got me intrigued about experimenting with that idea as a prompt–long sentences, short sentences, a mix of both–but only […]