Springfield, VA, USA. I avoid commercial pastries; they are bad for my waistline. However, I do love a really good blueberry scone. Every so often when out doing my tasks in life I simply can’t resist and swing by a coffee shop and indulge in what passes in my life for a guilty pleasure. One day, I stopped at a shop, ordered up a coffee and a scone — blueberry, my favorite — and settled in to eat my delight and read the Science section of the New York Times. Horrors! The scone was some sort of stale chocolate thing.

I went to the counter to complain and the young man told me that was the only kind of scone available (my choice was sold out). I pointed out that the sign in the case said blueberry. The clerk only half-jokingly said I should pretend. Really? What about my expectations? And what would happen if we all decided to mislabel things because we should just pretend? I told the clerk his employer had engaged in a deceptive business practice, but he merely shrugged and passed on to the next customer.

Play can be fun, especially with children or the dog. It doesn’t work so well if I vote for one candidate based on her or his policies, only to d

Springfield, VA, USA. I have met two men in my life who lost their penises to a misfortune of life. They weren’t born with HBS, but accident or disease confronted them. These are my notes on our encounters, my meetings with men looking for lives to live.

A city on the eastern seaboard of the United States drew me in for my periodic medical examination. The stairs leading up to a hospital rarely convey the charm of what might lie ahead, only the terrifying possibilities of what might lie within.

The hospital I visited is old and prestigous, but ill-equipped to calculate the tolls paid by the human heart. While there, and as usual, I stopped in for my regular visit to the pediatric burn ward. As a long-term burn survivor of nominally terminal burn injuries, the gatekeepers let me in, figuring my example might help comfort the kids.

My mother once caught my younger brother playing with matches. In frustration, she exposed my burn sites to him hoping that would block him from doing it again. That was awful, given that children often feel so guilty when terrible things happen to their families.

But a visit to the burn ward isn’t like that. I

Washington, DC, USA. Can we at all agree and let transsexuals be transsexuals? Human language, while inherently imprecise, does convey rich meanings that frequently become the basis for action, inaction, or dismissal of real needs. Anyone up for a game of oxymoron?

Consider the odd joining of the terms “non-op” and “transsexual” into “non-op transsexual”. And what about pre-op transsexuals? Non-op? Let’s talk about it.

Here is the short form: the original meaning of “non-op” came from “no-op”, a term used in early computer languages. Basically, it referred to an instruction that does nothing (it was sometimes used by assembler-level programmers as filler for data areas).

Managers, of course, took things around a bad turn when they used the term to identify a person who contributes nothing to a project, or has nothing going on upstairs, or both (he or she is “no-op."

The evolved term, “non-op”, did gain traction in other contexts.

For transsexuals, some now apply the term to a person who, for a variety of reasons, does not proceed with Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS). Some are “pre-op” individuals in transition to