It's difficult to understand how influences earlier in our lives can come back to affect us as adults. In my case, I was a small, nerdy guy in high school with low self-esteem. My only saving grace is my intelligence and good grades. In my senior year some of the popular, athletic guys befriended me and asked for my help with their studies. I was smart enough to know that they were just using me, but it still felt good to...

It's understandable that parents want to protect their children from all the evil and dangers in the world. But in some cases, the restrictions they impose on their kids end up backfiring and having unintended consequences. That was the case for me. My parents were very strict on me, and when I had my first opportunity to have sex with others, I embraced it enthusiastically. My name is Michelle, and I’m now living with my...

It was a traumatic experience for my wife Cynthia and I when we had to leave our beautiful home on the ocean in San Diego and move to Atlanta. I am the Group President for a business segment that was sold by our parent company and we needed to move for me to keep my lucrative job. My name is Ed, and at fifty years old, Cindy and I didn’t expect a move like that but we made the most of it and searched for the best neighbor...

Most of us have probably had experiences in our younger years that we would just as soon forget. I had some experiences like that in my junior and senior years in high school, and they were all but forgotten until chance reared its ugly head. My name is Walter, and I’m a pretty average sixty-two-year-old married, white man atsix feet’ tall, weighing one hundred and eighty-five pounds, with grey hair and beard, and hazel e...

,I think it’s fair to say that most people don’t grow up thinking about running for political office, and it’s usually personal circumstances that evolve to encourage them to do so. That is certainly the case with my husband Ed, and you might be interested in learning the path we took to his becoming elected to be the State Representative for our district in 2012. My name is Abigail, but everyone calls me Abi, and Ed and...

I was a pretty normal boy growing up in a small town near Birmingham, Alabama, and I had a large group of friends who were very involved in sports. We were in little league and pee wee football together and continued to play together through middle school and high school. My best friend was Alan, and our families lived close together from the time we were in the first grade. This story describes my experiences with Alan i...

I have been playing poker with four good friends for many years. We take turns hosting the parties every week, and when it’s my turn my wife usually goes out for the evening, so she doesn’t get stuck serving the drinks and snacks. Part of that is also due to us being a black couple, and she doesn’t like being around my white friends that much. There normally isn’t much excitement, and that’s probably unusual since we are...

The national Boy Scouts organization has numerous, excellent programs to help young men develop leadership skills. Our church was looking into establishing a troop for our boys, to help keep them from being tempted by gangs. The problem was we are located in a smaller, largely-minority, lower-income neighborhood in the South End district of Albany, New York. Our church is composed of approximately half white families with...

I have always thought that my sister Denise and I were lucky to be raised by parents who taught us to be unprejudiced and accepting of all ethnicities. We grew up in the suburbs near Philadelphia, which has a sizeable Puerto Rican population, and we had a representative mix of Caucasian, black, and Latino friends. My name is Ed, and this story takes place when I am forty-two years old and Denise is forty-three. But first,...

Angie's Perspective In Part 1 of this story we learned that hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains near our home in Roanoke, Virginia had become my husband Ed’s primary exercise and relaxation. My name is Angie and I prefer to go to the gym for my workouts. We are both twenty-five years old, Ed works in the healthcare industry, and I have a part-time job as the coach for a girls’ volleyball team in high school. Since we final...

My wife Angie and I grew up and went to college in Wisconsin, where I earned a master’s degree in healthcare management, and Angie earned a master’s degree in education. At the age of twenty-five we moved to Roanoke, Virginia since I got a job with one of the large healthcare insurers there. Angie couldn't find a teaching position right away, but she did get a volleyball coaching job at a high school, which was part-time...

One of the perks of working for a large corporation with global interests is the occasional opportunity to travel internationally at the company’s expense. In my case, I'm a senior chemical engineer for an oil company headquartered in Houston, and periodically traveled to one of our petrochemical plants in Puerto Rico. It's not technically international travel since Puerto Rico is a territory of the US, but it was a welco...

It's difficult for many people to learn foreign languages, but I was lucky to have an aptitude for it. I could fluently speak, read and write Spanish by the end of middle school and I became fluent in French and German in high school. It was clear to me at the beginning of my senior year in high school that I wanted to attend a college that specialized in the language arts. I still didn't know which languages I wanted to...

The period from the 1960s to the 1980s has been defined as the ‘Sexual Revolution’. That was a time when premarital and extramarital sex were much less stigmatizing, and homosexuals were gaining more acceptance by society. That was also a time when birth control medication was becoming mainstream, and our culture was much more accepting of sex in the media than in the past. It was in that backdrop that my wife, Linda, and...

Most of my friends and I were probably considered to be geeks by the popular kids in our high school in Houston. We spent most of our free time in one another’s basements playing video games and teaching ourselves computer and video technology. But it turned out that it wasn’t a waste of time. By the time I graduated, I had a deep understanding of basic electronics, video and computer technology and was even an accomplish...