[The following blog contains mentions of physical and emotional abuse, as well as homophobia and transphobia.] When I was eleven years old, my father made me start going to the gym that he and Mom had joined about a year earlier. They’d taken me there before and made me sit in the waiting area while they worked out, but as my father started realizing things about me that I hadn’t yet realized about myself, he started doing a lot of things to try to pull…
The assignment books they sold at the abattoir of a “school” I went to were about as big as a pack of notebook paper. Given how much homework we were all assigned there, those assignment books were kind of a necessity, and I don’t like remembering how many late nights I had to spend crossing every item out of each daily column in those books one-by-one. I couldn’t find those assignment books when I went off to college, so I bought smaller ones that I…
Historic Hurricane Dorian unleashing ‘catastrophic’ blow in northern Bahamas, hurricane warnings posted for Florida’s east coast (Washington Post)UN Climate Panel: Emissions Must Fall Rapidly by 2030 to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change (ecowatch.com) A little over a year ago, when I woke up to an email telling me that I’d been offered this full-time teaching position here in Wisconsin, I had to read it through three times to make sure that I was understanding it correctly. To say that I’d cast a wide net in my…
This Saturday will mark a year since I moved into this apartment, the afternoon after I stepped foot in Wisconsin for the first time. As I mentioned recently, I didn’t come up here with much, and I still haven’t done a lot to get all my stuff from Toledo shipped up to me, mostly because I’ve been keeping so busy here that I haven’t had the time to figure out just how to do that economically. I brought most of the essentials with me when…
After I got to Wisconsin last August, I only had eleven days between my arrival here and when I had to teach my first class. I’ve taught classes on short notice before, but I’ve almost always done so at places where I’ve already been teaching, so I have some idea about curriculum requirements and the like before I start planning things out. Trying to put together classes in less than two weeks when I’ve not only never taught at an institution before, but I’ve gone…