This post was going to be short. Then it got long. And now I know it's an ode to my parents -- When I was in school, one of the traditions I always looked forward to was going to the office supply store to get new school supplies with my parents. It moved me that they always allowed me to choose pretty things. Not the plain white erasers, but the colorful, scented ones. Not the yellow pencils, but pink ones, with my name stenciled on them in gold letters. The notebooks with the thick, creamy paper. The Hello Kitty mini stapler I could clip to my backpack. It seemed to me, every year, that the list of supplies was endless. There were even these double-sided colored pencils in El Salvador that we bought every year. One side was red, the other side was blue. Those pencils came in really handy when I was making study materials like vocabulary lists, notecards, and outlines. My mother made me take calligraphy lessons as a young child because she wanted me to have...