This past week included the fifth anniversary of Mom’s passing back in 2016. I wasn’t quite sure how I would handle this fact; five is a “big number” to get through, but the day also happened to be a day off for me because our parent campus scheduled our Fall Break for that exact day. From all the other deaths I’ve experienced over the years leading up to Mom’s, I knew that time did make the anniversaries less painful, but that there would be some…
The .org will become old enough to legally buy alcohol in the United States next month. I haven’t given much thought to this, mainly because of the chaos that’s erupted in my life over the past couple of months, but even if next month’s anniversary pales in comparison to this website turning the big two-oh last year, this is still a significant milestone. As drastically as the .org has changed over these twenty-one years, in keeping with all the changes in my life during that…
[The following blog contains mentions of suicide.] UNC-Chapel Hill cancels classes after police investigate reported suicides (Charlotte News-Observer via Yahoo! News) Throughout my teaching career, I’ve dealt with students from a very wide range of upbringings and socioeconomic statuses. Trying to pinpoint any single factor as being primarily determinative of students’ success in college, regardless of how “success” is defined (a whole separate argument) is foolhardy, but if you forced me to pick one thing to focus on when it comes to helping incoming college…
[The following blog contains mentions of bullying.] My gullibility in my earliest years knew no bounds. I don’t even want to think about how often I fell for the old trick of someone holding out something nice to me (like a piece of candy), cajoling me to grab it, and then taking it away at the last second. (My lack of physical coordination probably made me a prime target for that sort of thing.) No matter how often I got tricked, I couldn’t stop myself…
To say that Boogie Records was an institution in Toledo would be a severe understatement. Although I browsed there on nearly a weekly basis in my early years, it was in 1994, the year I turned eighteen and went off to college for the first time, that I probably gave them more of my money than at any other time in my life. That was the year they began offering a wide variety of “import” CDs, their euphemism for bootleg concert recordings and other semi-legal…