Beyond All Repair

politics, rhetoric, teaching Leave a comment

What Betsy DeVos got wrong about Detroit schools (Detroit Free Press)Education Secretary Betsy DeVos held in civil contempt for violating judge’s order on student loan collection (USA Today) I don’t read that many novels about war — I haven’t been reading many novels at all lately, since I’m chin-deep in research for my next non-fiction book — but I’ve read the same scene in more than a couple of novels, and it’s kind of stuck in my head since I realized how frequently I’ve seen…

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Settling In

mom, personal Leave a comment

This Tuesday will be the third anniversary of Mom’s passing, and in some ways it’s felt like the hardest anniversary I’ve had to deal with so far. I’ve been thinking about the anniversary in the days leading up to it more than I have the others, and I’ve taken the day off work. (The first anniversary fell on a Sunday, so there weren’t any issues there, but the second was on a Monday when I did teach a class at eight in the morning, but…

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Coming Out Ace(s)

glbt, personal Leave a comment

About Ace Week (aceweek.org) A little over a year ago, I did an interview on the Asexual Artists website where I talked about my work and how my asexuality influences my life. It was kind of my public coming-out as an asexual, although many of my friends had known for a while. I recall that I wanted to write more about my asexuality after that interview came out, but it was published the same month that I got offered my teaching job and had to…

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Monsters Never Really Die

personal Leave a comment

[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…

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Pay Street

teaching, television Leave a comment

HBO Max locks down exclusive access to new Sesame Street episodes (The Verge) The first iPhone was released a little over twelve years ago. This means that students who entered college this year were about six years old when the iPhone came out, and although I certainly have memories of my life from before I turned six, I don’t have that many. If we aren’t yet at a point where new college students can’t remember a world without smartphones, we will be in the next…

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