Articles written by Mark Weaver

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About me - Mark Weaver

I am currently working on a memoir project and a novel (I'll be in need of an agent when these are ready for publication). I took some time off work to really focus and try to get these two projects ready for the market by the beginning of 2008. I'm interested

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Creative Writing > Memoirs Memoirs: Memories: 1 of 98

"All right everyone," Mrs. Smith said, holding her arms up like a conductor. She put them back down so that we could not see them on the keys of the upright piano. The chords we had come to recognize as the beginning of "Yellow Submarine" rang through the music room. "In the town where I was born lived a man who sailed to se...
Arts & Humanities > Language Learning Tips The best way to learn a foreign language: 2 of 29

Factors to Consider When Learning a New Language Language learning is one of those features of the human experience that has been relegated to academics so that most of us have come to associate learning a language with going to school or to some institution, doing homework, doing exercises in class and in a workbook, and ha...
Arts & Humanities > Philosophical Concepts Understanding the meaning of creativity: 2 of 23

"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries," A.A. Milne writes. Likewise, Albert Einstein claimed, "Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal." Creativity is often taken as a virtue in our society, hailed as a great skill, as a wonderful ...
Creative Writing > Humor Humor: Driving in the city: 1 of 9

There are three rules to driving in Dallas, Texas. If you know them, you will derive a far more tolerable experience out of driving. The first is what I call the four-way-stop-and look-at-each-other rule. When you come to a four-way stop intersection, and at least one other driver is present at the intersection, it is import...
Creative Writing > Reflections Reflections: Individualism: 7 of 32

Conformity is a part of the human experience, a reality that will forever work against your creative aspirations. In the United States, there is a collective ethos of individualism that permeates our ethics and mythology (the epic story we see ourselves belonging to). Most Americans will have a surface-level wariness about c...
Creative Writing > Humor Humor: Travel: 19 of 83

The brochure said "bear-proof storage" was available. This is a reality check, a truth that militates against the propaganda of children's literature, an invitation to understand that children's books are more entertainment than exposition. Just as an example, consider the infinite patience of parents in such stories-suffici...
Creative Writing > Reflections Reflections: Poverty: 11 of 34

The American conception of poverty is of some person, class, or an entire culture that does not have the means of consumption. When this means of consumption is lacking, we automatically assume that likewise people don't have their basic needs met. Do we assume that money is necessary for both, as it is in an industrialized ...
Relationships & Family > Coping with Divorce Considering divorce: How to deal with doubt: 6 of 14

In midlife, people often come to regret the dishonest and less than humane things they did in their earlier life. For me, I came to regret the sane and sensible. For one, I dedicated myself to a life of service as a missionary, which not only left me in debt for a few years after getting a missionary degree from a Bible coll...
Creative Writing > Humor Humor: Things I think about while waiting in line: 28 of 65

Waiting in line is an invitation for the nueroses that rule my life to have the chance to assert themselves above the din of my psychses. It is as if line were created for the specific purpose of allowing humans to look at each other and think of multifarious ways to annoy and bother me. At the risk of revealing my paranoia,...
Religion & Spirituality > Christian Doctrine & Issues Guide to Christian principles of sexual morality: 15 of 34

At the age of twelve, Mom and Dad, under the ruse of cleaning my brother's and my room, conducted an expurgation that included a resurrection of a plethora of dust-covered items from under the bed. Inside a box originally created for Big Jim's Lazervette, they found the two dozen Penthouse magazines I'd hidden with great con...