LIFE IS SHORT | Autobiography as Haiku

(Rebecca D'Angelo - For The Washington Post)

I type my 3-year-old son's preschool class newsletter. HAPPY PARENT'S DAY! reads the text at the top of the handwritten draft. I edit the text as HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!, type the rest and submit for duplication. My phone rings. "You need to change the word back to PARENT'S." "Why?" "Inclusiveness, someone might be insulted." "Like who?" "Well, families with two fathers." "What about Father's Day?" "We can't say that either." "Aren't you insulting the mothers and fathers?" "It's our policy." I tell the school they can white-out my disrespectful words and my child's registration for the fall semester.

David Becker

Kensington

Post-Ivy League, post-investment bank, pre-grad school. I'm comfortably nestled in the quarter life crisis void where every vodka and tonic chips away at my savings and the line, "I'm Raj, 26, and unemployed" is met with muted smiles and calculation of my marital market value, determining if I can provide the BMW, basset hound and MTV-crib-style house by 2011. Being Sri Lankan, not dark enough to be black, not light enough to resemble European, leaves me in genetic No Man's Land with the ladies. Love is blind, but not to income or skin pigment.

(Rebecca D'Angelo - For The Washington Post)

I figure there is always reincarnation.

Rajeev Sreetharan

Bethesda

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