Category Archives: personal

Shadowed

books, personal Leave a comment

The recent phenomenon of book publishers putting relatively high-prestige titles on deep discount for their digital versions — for anywhere from ninety-cents to four bucks — has been both a blessing and a curse for me. I definitely appreciate being able to pick up books on the cheap, and in addition to boosting my pleasure-reading piles for whenever I have the time to get to those (I was practicing tsundoku long before I heard that word used to describe it), I’ve found some genuinely useful…

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The Masks We Choose to Wear

personal Leave a comment

Should you wear a mask after getting a COVID-19 vaccine? 5 reasons why the answer is ‘Yes.’ (USA Today) One of the things I wasn’t able to take with me from Toledo is the very early nineties-style, very purple Caboodles makeup case I’d been toting around with me for decades. Apart from just not having the space to bring it along to Colorado, I’d gotten into a pattern with my makeup where I was using the same four things (concealer, powder, blush, and lipstick) for…

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(Cello) Blue

music, personal, politics Leave a comment

I’ve been struggling to articulate a path forward from this past Wednesday’s events since I started watching the live footage coming from inside the Capitol building on television that afternoon. (I started typing “struggling to make sense of” the events, but that isn’t true because I know exactly how we got to that point as a nation.) This past Sunday night, as I was listening to Music from the Hearts of Space on my hometown public radio station, I still didn’t know what I was…

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Can’t Start Over

personal, teaching Leave a comment

One of the books I’ve been recommending almost non-stop since I first read it is Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods, her ethnographic study of how socioeconomic class affects parenting styles, which in turn affect how children develop. Not only was Unequal Childhoods very useful for me in my research for my next book, but I was able to apply its concepts to my teaching approaches immediately, as I work to find ways to help my students adjust to the demands of college life. More recently, I…

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Hindsight

personal, writing Leave a comment

Now that I’ve turned in final grades for this past semester, I should have more time over the next week to work on my bigger projects. Even though spring semester doesn’t start until the 25th of January, I will have some extra preparation to do for that, simply because I’ll be teaching two courses I’ve never taught before, as well as my first creative writing course in over a decade (which will require more work for me because it was originally scheduled for another instructor…

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