As a high school English teacher, I’m always wondering what my writing hobby has to do with my job. Yes, I do all of the stereotypical things an English teacher does: tries to write novels and short stories, tries to write essays that may be of note somewhere, reads as if our eyes evolved to…
Protein
The Question Through all of the various cultural arguments about what is offensive and who sees the world the right way, I have realized that a word has slipped through: “protein.” I think I first heard this neologism or reframed use of the word from some popular restaurant that will probably dawn on me as…
Teaching to Academia
Reading for a Refresh Deep into the summer, yet a few weeks before school, the professional development books I stacked on the far reaches of my home desk morph from a thing to politely ignore to a an interesting to-do list. This year, I have a book about Socratic seminars, three books about writing, one…
Shaken
Environmental Control Usually, when you grow up with something, like a childhood of enjoying not-so-pleasant looking ripe bananas–speckled oxidation brown, far from a pristine green or yellow–it becomes normalcy, a state of comfort and not-surprise. It’s eating around the mold. It’s sleeping without worrying that your body will roll out of bed onto the floor….
Alone at Whistling Arch
The Fears That Bind Us Coming up any sort of stairs was my greatest childhood fear. Sure, I wouldn’t be happy about going down to a dark basement: I’d race for the lights and move slowly around corners. But, for some reason, I felt like going upstairs was like defying a monster’s plan, like you…
Above the Bolt
Made a YouTube video about rock climbing fall training:
Emoting Whilst Driving Vehicles
Preamble In a 24 hour period over the course of the 26th and 27th of February, I was the victim of two forms of vehicular emoting. The first was the “daring” sort of vehicular emoting. Not quite the most one can do with anger whilst seat-belted in a moving vehicle, but an act that carried…
The Lunch Walk
The Industrial Nopes One of the reasons I became a teacher–and I know this is not what I should be saying–was so that I wouldn’t have to work in a cubicle. It was at the beginning of my teenagedom that I had suspected that the cubicle environment would not be my bag. I don’t remember…
Temporary Bones
If one deigns to walk in a park in Ohio during the winter, you will plot a course through temporary bones. You will find temporary bones reaching every which way: reaching toward the water, the sky, toward other bones, toward the ground, toward you. Your journey will not be without classification issues. There are temporary…
Fuddy Duddyism: Learning That You Might Not Like RPGs Anymore
I. Here I was, in the blizzarded-out mountains of Colorado in the 1800s, navigating a horse to some sort of hunting ground to score some deer for our starving party. A non-player character (NPC) made small talk with me while the game tried to clue me on things that it had already taught about riding…