Word: backyarders
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...reaching middle age. Here come 75 million aching backs. A generation of reluctant grown-ups is raising children, caring for aging parents and beginning to think about retirement. Instead of pumping iron, preening and networking, they are worrying about orthodontists, skateboards and college tuitions. The backyard now has more appeal than the boardroom...
...Karbovsky himself hopes to leave Bulgaria one day to find a better life in the West. "I am a writer from the world's backyard," he says. "The world doesn't know in what kind of corrosion we live here. There are no extras in our lives besides survival." He also brings his grim perspective to a live two-hour radio talkshow, Radio Pirates, which is shaking up Bulgaria's stodgy media establishment by examining for-merly taboo issues - like aids, homophobia and neo-Nazism - on which the government is seen to have failed. Karbovsky's message is unrelentingly bleak...
...schools have forced parents and kids to face an uncomfortable truth: sometimes it is necessary to "tattle." From the time our kids start talking, most of us parents discourage them from reporting on the everyday indignities they suffer at the hands of hair-pulling sisters, obnoxious little brothers or backyard bullies. We want our kids to be strong and learn to handle situations without our intervention. We don't want our kids to tattle. Except, of course, when they should...
...dangerous habits - like reading. I learned to walk around with the book covers hidden, so the sci-fi titles looked like schoolbooks. I would still get my ass kicked occasionally, no matter how careful I was. It would happen in the schoolyard, on a corner, or in somebody's backyard - before I knew it I was on the ground with some stringy delinquent straddling me, pounding his fists into my stomach...
...black clothes, quiet, picked on--I thought of my own high school. With athletes picking on the "goths" and the gay kids, racial tensions sometimes simmering beneath the surface, it was just the sort of place I could see such tragedy occurring. Now it has happened, right in my backyard. I am shocked and saddened, but not surprised. It is too early to know whether any of these tensions were a factor in these shootings--whether it was bullying or prejudice, or simply, horribly random. Yet schools have become places where students might feel uncomfortable about being themselves and unprotected...