E  S  S  A  Y   The day before Easter, I set about making my mother’s traditional Easter cake. The recipe calls for self-rising flour instead of regular flour. I discovered I didn’t have enough self-rising flour, so I asked my husband to run to the store to buy more.

“What?” he asks, “I’ve never heard of self-rising flour! Can’t you just add something to regular flour to make the cake rise?”

“Look,”  I say, “It’s my mother’s traditional Easter recipe, and I’m not going to fiddle with it. Here’s what the self-rising flour box looks like. It won’t be that hard.”

If there is one thing that makes a makes a man nervous, it’s being asked to go to the store to buy something he knows nothing about. He would rather be given a bow and arrow with a request to shoot a wild pig because he would have a better chance of bringing home the right thing.

Jim is a seasoned hunter, though. He knows what to do. He folds up the flour box and shoves it into his pocket to make sure he gets an exact match.

After Jim leaves, l realize I have only one egg. The recipe calls for 2 large eggs. No problem, I send him a text: “I need large eggs.” He responds “OK”.

He walks in the door and hands me the bag. “Well, here’s what you asked for.” He hopes that if he states this firmly enough, he can avert any criticism of his efforts. Self-rising flour…check. Large eggs….wait, these are JUMBO eggs. I said I needed large eggs, not jumbo.

“But,” he pleads, “Those eggs are large! They are the largest they had!”

I get it. His male instinct has kicked in. The bigger the better. If I had asked for a large wild pig, and he then brought home a boar the size of Texas, the village would eat for days. He would be a hero. However, times have changed. These eggs are so big, they look as if they would hurt the chicken coming out. They will definitely throw off my mother’s traditional Easter cake recipe.

“I’m sorry”, I tell him, “but I need you to take these eggs back and buy smaller ones.”

“Well, ok.”

He is gone for a long time. Finally he calls. “I’ve been to three stores and none of them has small eggs.” As proof, he texts me a picture of each size carton. “What do you want me to do?”

I tell him to buy the carton marked “Large.”

He explodes. “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place!”

I say, “I don’t know, honey. I guess I should have…and Mom called to say she is bringing the cake. Might as well shoot a wild pig on the way home.  We can always use the bacon.”

Kathy Brennan has organized information for a living as an educator, computer programmer and government policy writer. Now she is doing it for fun as a stand up comic and humorous writer. See more at http://mrskathybrennan.com/.

E  S  S  A  Y   Can you really label an entire generation a bunch of sociopaths? You can if you write a book with the title A Generation of Sociopaths, but that doesn’t make it so.

Antisocial, lacking empathy, impulsive, egotistical, shameless, manipulative, deceitful….are these words that describe you or your fellow boomers? Maybe a few words match up with a few friends or acquaintances, but an entire generation? I don’t think so.

The author cites the usual suspects for his claim. Permissive parenting, too much television and prosperous times made us who we are. Massive debt, unemployment and environmental degradation are all down to us. Somehow, one generation (albeit a big one) has been able to ruin the world for everyone. The author won’t even give baby boomers credit for doing anything worthwhile. No credit for equal rights or anti-war movements, no pat on the back for efforts to promote clean water and protect the environment. We just greedily looked out for our own wellbeing and to hell with everyone else. All for one and all for one.

Slandering an entire generation with massively scaled generalizations seems so unfair, but when you’re part of what was then the largest generation ever, you come to expect that there’s a target on your back. Honestly, don’t you think our influence on everything from culture to politics is a little overrated? Every generation is responsible for a variety of trends but bell bottom pants and platform shoes did not really change the world.

Isn’t there a little bit of irony to the fact that the millennial author of the book is a venture capitalist. He was an early investor in Pay Pal and Facebook and that qualifies him to generalize about our lack of empathy? I’m thinking that banking on the internet to produce the next big thing to make a pile of money has a sociopathic ring to it.

Too bad we won’t be around in 40 years or so when someone writes a book titled “Millennials: The Next Generation of Sociopaths.”

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle.

E  S  S  A  Y   I’d heard stories.

You can wait in the emergency room for a long time. There will be lots of other people waiting for a doctor. I didn’t think I needed to be there, despite days of serious abdominal pain. This is called denial: I don’t get sick.

I went reluctantly and spent nine hours there, time I shared with all manner of wretched people waiting their turn for a bed and a little privacy. The tragedies unfolding included – but were not limited to – two women enduring miscarriages, one teenage boy writhing on the floor suffering a drug overdose, and one little girl of about four or five, sporting a huge mop of curly black hair, who had fallen on that adorable head and was clearly in serious trouble. She remained almost comatose for the several hours that I observed her. All the while I watched these folks, not the least bit concerned about myself, not guessing that I was possibly closer to death than any of them.

The staff of the emergency room are worth a mention. I am not speaking here about the doctors. You do not see a doctor until a bed becomes available. I’m talking about the various receptionists, nurses, and technicians who tend to you while you wait. They are calm. So calm, in fact, so deliberate and slow-moving, that at no time do you get the sense that they feel anything of an emergency nature is taking place in their sphere of influence. I’m not sure how they face so many distressed people knowing all they can do is provide them with forms to fill out.

So I waited. And watched. Both ailing women were comforted by their husbands and mothers while they suffered pain and mourned the imminent loss of a child. The teenage boy was accompanied by his mother, who mainly sat there and watched him. She was so cool about the whole thing, reading a magazine, that I suspected she’d been through this ordeal before. The little girl was passed back and forth from mother to father and opened her eyes occasionally when she was being moved and then closed them again.

I’d like to be able to end this little diatribe by telling you what happened to everybody, but of course I don’t know. One by one they all disappeared through the door that led to the much coveted beds. Although I walked around that area several times while I was waiting for my own diagnosis, I never saw any of them. No doubt the women were fine eventually. And the drug overdose boy was already sufficiently awake to walk with help by the time his bed became available. It’s only the little girl I worry about. I hope she is alert and playing with her friends again. And me? Ruptured appendix. Oops! I guess I do get sick.

Norma Libman is a journalist and lecturer who has been collecting women’s stories for more than twenty years. You can read the first chapter of her award-winning book, Lonely River Village, at NormaLibman.com.

E  S  S  A  Y    What is it that makes somebody want to be an actor? I’m still processing the idea that I was willing to drop every previous priority in my life and instead spend the last twenty-four hours chasing the dream of a role in a television series. Oh, my agent tells me I have an audition in the morning? Better get to work.

I hardly slept that night between memorizing the dialogue and wondering what if I did get the part and this ends up being a week out of my so-called life where I get to hang with the Big Dogs, or do I need to content myself with the notion that maybe it won’t work out but still “An Actor Prepares” to the best of our abilities and then has to accept the real possibility of being too tall, having too much hair, not enough hair, too good looking, things like that.

I try hard to put the audition behind me after I’m back in the Subaru reviewing ‘how it went.’ It helps that they seemed to have called in a range of types for this part. There was the shaved head sport body presence, the wooly-faced fringe look, the Euro-sleek tailored model, and me who was once previously classified as ‘slightly off-beat.’ The only interview question was ‘How tall are you?’ My guess is that the principal actor is vertically challenged.

I said the lines in front of a casting crew which consisted of three dangerously thin young women who treated me like an alien, as if old guys couldn’t be in movies. Well it has been a while since I worked, but hope springs eternal.

The part was well written, and it’s wise to remember that most of the auditions we do won’t even result in a call back, never mind the outside chance that I am exactly what they think they want for this part, or maybe some other thing where they see my headshot and say ‘Oooh that’s exactly who we want for the grandfather role.’ Keep dreaming, or get out of the kitchen.

But it’s not lost on me that I’m lucky to be living in a place like this where these things are happening, that there are plenty of actors in Albuquerque who didn’t get this particular opportunity, and what if the next phone call is telling me to be on set this afternoon?

Harpeth Rivers is a New Mexico transplant from all over who has in the last year written songs about isosceles triangles, played bass guitar in a band, and declared himself “Retro-eclectic.” His novel-in-progress is entitled Last Year.

E  S  S  A  Y   If you’re not looking down when hiking, you either have super powers or you fall a lot. The point is you’re constantly thinking about where you are going in order to plant the next step and the step after that, and the step after that. The trail could be rocky, muddy, sandy or covered in pine needles (my favorite), but you need to be looking down and making hundreds (maybe thousands) of split second decisions about where to plant your feet.

With all that concentration focused on remaining upright, it can be easy to miss nature’s feng shui efforts along the trail. You will encounter a log or root that crosses the trail at an angle with pine cones or rocks placed strategically in just the right position. You might see a natural step carved from a rock ledge that traverses the path. Even treefalls that block the trail have a natural symmetry that is unmistakably nature’s handiwork.

When viewed on a map, the entire trail can be an example of feng shui in that it conforms to the slope and topography of the land. Hiking trails were usually constructed with a nod towards finding the easiest line or axis. Given feng shui’s history as a forerunner of the magnetic compass, it makes perfect sense that there’s a real astronomical connection between the trail and the stars.

The English translation of feng shui is “wind-water” and both of these elements have a significant impact on the appearance of a hiking trail. Drainage erosion has created new trails and rerouted old trails, while wind blown sand covers up the path or forces the hiker to find a new line or route.

Is feng shui science or mystical pseudoscience? It doesn’t matter to the hiker who just wants to take the correct line or the right steps. Humans may create the trails but nature, and by extension feng shui, performs most of the upkeep. All we can do is try to take the right steps and be on the lookout for millions of feng shui examples one might see on any given hike.

It shouldn’t be that hard to see them. You are looking down at your feet for most of the hike.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle.