Vivian McInerny's Blog
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Apr.26.2013
Science made me believe in a god. It’s true. And I was a diehard skeptic about science.
My disillusionment with the subject began mere minutes after I cracked the spine of my first elementary school science textbook. The teacher explained that we’d be doing scientific experiments, and I was...
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Apr.18.2013
She was not as big as I’d imagined, that was my first thought. My second was that I was, at age 11, clearly not worthy to be in the presence of Our Lady as evidenced by my first thought.
This was no apparition. She was real. OK, a real statue. But she was kind of freaking me out. Did I just see her...
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Apr.12.2013
I have a tendency to drift through life. Things happen. I react. It has not been bad. Good things have happened and i've reacted, for the most part, positively. There were some really crummy times too when I got knocked down, but I got up again. (Now I'm going to have that Chumbawamba song in...
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Apr.02.2013
Once, for a story, I went to a hypnotist. I’d suggested the idea at a weekly meeting and got a lot of eye rolling from my editor and colleagues. But a few hypnosis clinics had recently popped up in the metro area so the story had a good news hook. The clinics promised an easy, painless way to...
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Mar.24.2013
I thought I’d be enlightened by now.
I don’t mean that metaphorically as in: “I imagined that with age would come a certain wisdom.”
No, I fully expected the sitting in the lotus position-on-a-mountain-top type enlightenment, the mantra-chanting-vibrating-with-the-universal-life-force...
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Feb.08.2013
Some moments come on big and important from the get-go. The assassination of John F. Kennedy; the September morning when the World Trade Center towers crumbled; the night we elected our first African American president. If I accomplish nothing terribly remarkable in my life – and the...
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Jan.31.2013
They say you are what you eat. I get that. But you also are where you live whether it be an ornate Victorian or a sparse glass box. Not that you’re going to move into a Queen Anne and suddenly start speaking with a bad English accent, drink tea and develop peculiarly prudish morals in direct...
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Jan.24.2013
Main Home Style Homb, sweet Homb
I must confess to a blatant bias against manufactured homes. I have my reasons. Rather, I have one certain 12-by-60 foot reason. When I was 9 years old, our family of eight squished inside one of those long, narrow, aluminum tubes like human...
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Jan.18.2013
A woman I know is an amazing entertainer. When she throws a dinner party, it’s performance art with an apron. For one gathering, she was excited to put to use a recently inherited antique family dining table. It was a long, narrow rustic carved wood thing rumored to have come from a castle.
I can’...
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Jan.15.2013
MEMO: Brainstroming session on marketing potential for Lance Armstrong issue
• Lance Armstrong may have shown us a cure for cancer: Lying.
• Maybe if you are able to deceive others so convincingly that you actually begin to believe your own lies, you can physically manifest these "truths." (Please...
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Jan.10.2013
The toboggan was rarely put to use. Probably because the 6-foot long sled was approximately the same length as the only hill around. So when my mother pulled it through the snowy backyard when I was a kid, I watched from the kitchen window, curious. Did she develop a...
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Dec.19.2012
You say you want a resolution? Well, you know, we all want to change the world. Just don’t expect everyone in the household to like it.
Way back when, my mother decided to install swinging doors between the hall and living room. They looked like the type of doors cowboys swaggered through in...
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Dec.14.2012
It’s happened. Again. A young man opened fire on a crowd for reasons that make no sense to anyone including, I suspect, the gunman. It is tragic. It is sad. Unfortunately, it is not shocking enough. We knew it would happen again. We just didn’t know when or where. We dread it but accept it...
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Dec.12.2012
A boy I went to school with had a mess of sisters all named Mary. There was Mary Elizabeth, Mary Catherine, Mary Anne and Mary Therese. They all went by their middle names. Except for Mary.
The brothers were named for Apostles.
Different Apostles.
If the brothers wanted to bug the sisters, they...
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Dec.07.2012
Every day all kinds of people, mostly of the female variety, have babies. But when a royal family member picks up a copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting suddenly all thoughts focus on one thing; the royal baby's room.
OK, so maybe that particular obsession is more prevalent among...
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Her daily blog for the newspaper is fun and quirky and to the point.”
—Top 101 Fashion Blogs; Smart School Finder.com
About Vivian
An accomplished feature writer, McInerny's articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines nationwide. She was a staff writer at The Oregonian, a daily newspaper in Portland, Oregon for 20 years. For two years she was managing editor of Oregon Home...
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