I won’t pretend that part of my interest in memes isn’t personal — on top of just desiring a quick laugh every now and then to let me temporarily unburden myself of all the things I’m trying to do, I prefer shorter breaks from my work to longer ones — but for the most part, studying memes is kind of part of my job. If I want to reach my students effectively, then I need to be able to be familiar with their languages and…
Americans plan Thanksgiving gatherings despite health official warnings (NBC via Yahoo! News) One of the smaller details I remember from the day Mom passed away is that I’d actually bought a ticket to a Halloween party that one of my friends was putting on that evening. I’d had misgivings about that party before I’d even bought a ticket, even though I was sure that if Mom had been able to articulate anything at that point, she would have encouraged me to go. I’d basically gone…
[The following blog contains mentions of suicide.] I woke up four years ago today with a sense of dread, having gone to bed the previous night before any formal announcements had been made about the election, but knowing by that point what kind of news I was likely to wake up to. (Given that I’d had two Red Bulls the day before, my tiredness might have been my body engaging in an unconscious act of self-preservation.) Mom had passed away a week and a half…
When Bodies of Words: Stories on Skin came out last year, I finally had a chance to tell the world about the story behind the Jane Austen-inspired “Bad Girl” tattoo I got on my right arm back in July of 2017. Granted, most of that story was promoted in an Instagram image from the publisher that came out before the book’s release (which is still the most-liked image on that Instagram account, possibly the closest I’ve ever come to winning a popularity contest in my…
Almost all of Wisconsin is classified as a COVID ‘hot spot’ (Yahoo! News) Between the time I made the final edits to last Monday’s blog, and when I posted it early that afternoon, I received word that our campus had just confirmed its first positive COVID-19 test, and that the employee who had tested positive was self-isolating at home as a result. I thought about adding that information to my blog, but decided against doing so since it didn’t feel particularly germane to the issues…