Category Archives: personal

Big Brother is Smacking Your Face With His ****

There are few things that will endear you more to me than turning me on to new music that I really like. I think this explains why I wasn’t so eager to complain about online tracking and such, because a fair percentage of the music I listen to in any good month was initially recommended to me by computer algorithms, starting with Musicmatch Jukebox back in the day, and continuing on through my rare dalliances with Pandora. It wasn’t that I didn’t see why people…

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Not My Year?

I’ve said before that I tend to do much more reflection and introspection on my birthday every March than I do at the start of a new calendar year, but I find myself coming into these final hours of 2023 without having any real ideas about what I should post here to close out the year. To be honest, I’ve been struggling with coming up with topics for this particular blog for weeks, and coming up with blog topics in general for a very long…

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The Night Before

One year ago at this moment, I was spending my last night in Richland Center, wondering how I’d managed to piece together the plan that would unfold the following day. I’d agreed to begin teaching at the Platteville campus months earlier, in the middle of my summer classes, but my initial efforts to find help with locating a new apartment, and moving all my stuff downstate, failed spectacularly. With a week to go before the planned move, I still wasn’t sure what would happen —…

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Oh, Hell!

That was Hedder’s first reaction a little over five years ago, when I told her that I’d gotten the full-time teaching position in Richland Center, Wisconsin that I’d interviewed for about two weeks earlier. I’d woken up a few moments earlier, checked my email on my phone, then checked it again, then checked it a third time, just because I was in utter disbelief about the job offer. I’d applied for over two hundred positions since moving in with Hedder the previous December, literally from…

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Not For Me

My social difficulties at school manifested from my very first day at Little Meadows Nursery School in Toledo, and both of the threads that created those difficulties stemmed from the television I watched in my earliest years. I devoured Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood every weekday, so my eagerness to come to school and learn even more things didn’t exactly endear me to my new classmates. In addition, because I was hooked on The Gong Show, my sense of humour was already spiraling out…

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