Category Archives: personal

In Enemy Territory

personal, sports, toledo 2019.04.15 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

NBA Playoffs 2019: Bucks make a statement to the rest of the Eastern Conference with Game 1 destruction of Pistons (CBSSports.com) Growing up in Toledo has a way of making you painfully aware of whatever Ohio State-University of Michigan sports rivalry is dominant at any particular moment. There used to be a whole chain of stores in Toledo devoted solely to clothing and other merchandise from the two colleges; it’s down to one location now, but it’s still a testament to how Northwest Ohio and…

Lingering

personal, weather 2019.04.08 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Even though I have two degrees from the University of Toledo, I only attended the graduation ceremony for the first one; the second ceremony coincided with a family event that my father wanted to go to, so I didn’t take part in the second ceremony. (My father wanted to go to this family event because he was worried about his mother’s failing health, but ironically enough, she wound up outliving him by a couple of years.) There was a lot going on in my life…

Klatsch Klutz

food, personal, toledo 2019.04.01 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

It wasn’t exactly like coffeehouses were invented in the nineties, but that might have been their modern heyday. The fictional coffeehouse that was central to a certain NBC sitcom may be the most iconic of its era, but in the middle part of the decade, back when independent stores and media were thriving, the coffeehouses that popped up around the Toledo area were lovely, and even though my hopes of becoming more social by sitting around drinking coffee there never really materialized, I still have…

Forty-Three

music, personal 2019.03.18 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

I remember playing the Smashing Pumpkins’ song “Thirty-Three” exactly ten years ago today. Beyond the fact that it’s just a good song, and that listening to it reminds me of a simpler time in my life, I had a very good reason for playing that song on that day: It was also the day that I turned thirty-three years old. As often as I’ve heard “Thirty-Three” throughout my life, I don’t think that song even felt more meaningful to me than it did when I…

No Off Switch

personal, work, writing 2019.03.04 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Last month was incredibly exhausting for me. In addition to all the weather-related problems I’ve been documenting online (perhaps too much, I know), and some challenges at work, I’ve been chin-deep in research for my next big book. An opportunity arose for me to go deep into one thread of my research, in order to write an article for a major academic journal, so I spent an awful lot of time tackling that, doing work that should definitely help when I get around to writing…