Category Archives: personal

Lost Jars

I finally dropped below 200 pounds early in 2001, the first time I’d weighed that much since middle school. The “Week From Hell” kind of put an end to that, as the stress of everything after the house fire (and me going back to college about six weeks after that) made me forget about the healthier eating I’d been doing. I got back below 200 again a couple of years later, but then my senior year of undergraduate kicked my tail good, and even though…

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RIPped Hearts

Kobe Bryant death spurs Planters to pause promo of Mr. Peanut funeral ads (CNET)Nancy Drew seemingly has been killed off in a comic, just in time for her 90th birthday (CNN) It probably goes without saying that Wisconsin is football country, and eight days ago I was tempted to tweet a GIF of that one scene from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope after I saw the score of the NFC championship game and realized that the Packers weren’t going to the Super Bowl.…

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Skin in the Game

One of the least rewarding parts of my graduate classes in English was having to read reviews of new books of literary criticism. Especially after an undergraduate class I took with a professor who helped shape my own pedagogical approaches, it was hard to read those reviews and not see how the reviewers were using the opportunity that review provided them — hardly a small one — to promote their own careers. At some point in nearly every review I read, the reviewer would invariably…

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Blocking the Story

[This blog contains spoilers for the video game Final Fantasy VII.] Final Fantasy 7 Remake Demo Intro Leaked (gamespot.com) I didn’t understand the appeal of online “reaction videos” until four and a half years ago, when the long-awaited Final Fantasy VII Remake was finally announced at E3 2015. After waiting nearly half my life for a modern remake of my favourite video game ever, this news was almost too much for me to handle, and I didn’t have many people in my life whom I…

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2020: Twenty-Four Hours to Go

I’ve never been one for making resolutions when the calendar year flips over, or really doing much of anything that night except watch the ball drop on television (which is really just a family tradition I’m continuing here for some reason, even though I don’t live in the Eastern time zone any longer). My birthday has always been a time for self-reflection for me, which may be the closest to those end-of-calendar-year feelings most people experience that I get. Just like with my birthday, though,…

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