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 —…
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…
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…
Far-right Twitter influencers first on Elon Musk’s monetization scheme (The Washington Post via msn.com) During my short stay in Colorado a few years ago, one of my most harrowing experiences came when Hedder was driving us home to Colorado Springs from some business we had in Aurora. Hedder was as obedient a driver as I was back then, but unlike me, she liked to antagonize drivers who were going too fast, or not using their turn signals, or things of that nature. As we were…
Canadian wildfire smoke moves across map, spreading bad air quality to Midwest, East Coast (USA Today via msn.com)Thousands of COVID-19 cases still reported every week | Fact check (USA Today via msn.com) I was almost completely unable to do anything but life’s basics for a couple of days last week. As the air quality maps quickly showed my little corner of Wisconsin falling into the purple zone, for “unhealthy” air quality due to wildfire smoke, not only were my eyes almost constantly stinging, but any…