Category Archives: toledo

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…

City Permanence

personal, toledo 2019.02.11 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Recently, I loaded up the busiest intersection near my old house on Google Maps and went into street-level view so I could have a first-person Google Street View of it. As much as I recognize how every corner of that intersection has changed over time — although the Internet has been failing me in my attempts to photographically prove that some Toledo staples of my time, like Centre supermarkets and Gastown gas stations, existed before they were driven out by bigger competitors — part of…

Glass City-Eyed

mom, personal, toledo 2018.12.03 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Eight days from today will mark the first anniversary of my departure from Toledo. Very early that morning, before the sun was even close to rising, a friend drove me from her house, where I’d been staying for a few months, to Detroit Metropolitan Airport. It wasn’t the first time I’d been to that airport — I’d gone there before with family members who were flying, and even to help pick up a traditional Japanese music ensemble that was hired to perform in the greater…

Out of Order

mom, personal, toledo 2018.10.01 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

The strong desire I had to be famous when I was very young might be attributable to a number of factors. My hyperactive imagination is certainly high on the list of potential reasons, not only because it facilitated my daydreams of fame, but also because I could think of lots of ways to harness that imagination to create works of art that would lead to me becoming famous (or so I believed back then). The rise of cable television in my early years, and MTV…

Badgered

personal, teaching, toledo 2018.08.27 Sean Shannon 1 Comment

It’s been almost a dozen years since I got my MA in English Literature. When I graduated, I really didn’t have any desire to pursue a doctoral degree in English, and little has changed since then. (I’ve thought about getting further graduate degrees in other fields, but that’s a topic for another time.) Apart from my feelings about continuing my studies in English, the teaching bug bit me hard before I even taught my first English class, and when I finally got my MA, I…