Ads and My Shifting Baseline Syndrome
Context: The Times A couple weekends ago, I deactivated my Facebook account. It was tough. Kind of. I was there in the beginning, so there was some nostalgic reckoning there. Like in the old days…
Context: The Times A couple weekends ago, I deactivated my Facebook account. It was tough. Kind of. I was there in the beginning, so there was some nostalgic reckoning there. Like in the old days…
The first time I voted, I researched candidates, trying to get down to the nitty gritty. Soaking in the issues and what was at stake. Reaffirming or discarding suppositions of the world. That kind of…
I hope I’m not alone in thinking, basically all the time, that I’m just not very good at what I do. I am speaking of a very special imposter syndrome: I’m a high school English…
I have a tick in my writing that has followed me for years. Maybe writing about it will be like when people who fear snakes do that process where they slowly acclimatize themselves to snake…
I have two books in my personal library that are begging to be read. They have been perused though. Taken off the shelf, taken stock of, and then put back on the shelf. One because…
Wherein the Author Describes the Beginning “Let me down,” I said. “Are you sure?” “Yes.” “But you are almost there.” “Let me down,” I said again, this time with the loud but hushed quality of…
When you are an English teacher, there are too many ways to teach. In the public view, you are teaching two really important skills: writing and reading. That’s a simplification. Teaching Language Arts is the…
I have been using a fictional race of human beings as an adjective lately. Because with technology where it is, we have more and more distinguished ourselves from a Vulcan lifestyle of logic. Let us…
Before college, my life was littered with empty cereal bowls. This was largely the fault, and perhaps the triumph, of my mother. I ate cereal like one greedily gasps for air after running 1,000 miles…
There was never one house or one place. I was born in a hospital in downtown Cincinnati and taken to my first home in the quaintness of Loveland. It is up to science to know…