Part of my job as an English teacher is to stay current on developments in the language, from Oxford comma debates to ever-changing citation styles. Keeping track of all the “loan words” that seep into English from other languages is a small part of that work, but it’s one of the more enjoyable things I get to do, if only because it helps me learn more about other cultures. It also provides an ongoing example of how languages change over time, and aren’t the static…
As wonderful as Mom was, she wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. She made chili every few weeks, and I never did like it, to the point where I wound up staying away from vegetarian chili recipes for most of my life. After I got here to Wisconsin, though, I knew that I needed to start making good warm-me-up meals I could take to campus with me for lunch and heat up in the microwave, so I bit the bullet and tried making…
I’m part of the generation that grew up on the first wave of cyberpunk, from movies like Blade Runner and television shows like Max Headroom, to countless books and graphic novels. There’s a lot to be said about how this work may have influenced our attitudes and philosophies, but one of the things that always caught my eye, probably because I was so young, was the visual motif of television/computer screens everywhere. The idea of being able to walk someplace and literally be unable to…
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…
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…