For all the stories during the pandemic of animals “taking over” spaces that had been largely abandoned during our collective self-isolation, I have to say that I wasn’t expecting to wake up today to news of a bear roaming on our parent campus. Our semester ended a couple of weeks ago, so there would have been a skeleton crew there even without the pandemic going on, but stories like this have a way of sticking with me. Platteville is over an hour’s drive from here,…
About six years ago, before the Supreme Court decision Obergefell vs. Hodges legalised marriage equality in all fifty states, I heard a common refrain from many of my students that went something like this. “I think I’m a conservative. I don’t like high taxes, and I believe in limited government, but you know what? The conservatives in politics are the same people who are keeping my gay friends from getting married. I can’t accept that, so when I went to vote for the first time,…
The worst end to a semester I ever had was the fall semester of 2017. My last day on campus was just four days before I flew to Colorado to begin so much of my life anew, and as I sat in the teachers’ lounge late that night, after everyone else had gone home, I started bawling my eyes out. Parts of me were definitely looking forward to that plane ride and the opportunities waiting for me at its end, but I was also frightened…
I was worried enough about the pandemic in the days leading up to our campus closing that I could feel my mind going to a very worrying place. For all the challenges I’ve faced after Mom’s passing, I could at least formulate some vague notion of the advice she’d give me if she were here in the flesh, even if they were challenges she never faced herself. A global pandemic that shuts so much of daily life down is something that neither she, nor even…
[This blog contains spoilers for the video games Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy VII Remake, as well as the television show Newhart.] As the hype for Final Fantasy VII Remake grew in the years following its 2015 announcement, and especially after I was finally able to play the game last month, I’ve had a very intense internal debate regarding how I should discuss my feelings about it. On the one hand, I’m not the video game aficionado I used to be…