Category Archives: personal

Cold Winds of Change

personal, toledo 2016.09.19 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Mid-September to mid-October has been a real problematic time for me. Most people with seasonal depression either have trouble with the deepest part of winter, or else the entirety of the season; I don’t know anyone else who has trouble with this specific time of the year. Even after I started teaching, the joy I feel after the first weeks of teaching new students has worn off by this time, and as the equinox approaches I find myself having a more difficult time feeling good…

Dull to Myself

personal, writing 2015.07.31 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Part of why I haven’t blogged so much this calendar year has been that I’ve been busy with other things, namely other writing projects. That’s especially been the case this summer, since I didn’t wind up with a class to teach; between the start of May and the end of June my fiction-writing total alone reached over 250,000 words. I haven’t been quite so productive this month, in part because I’ve needed to shift my focus back to editing what I’ve already written (you just…

Adventures in Cell Phone Hell

personal, shopping 2014.12.06 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

If you’ve done any studies in macroeconomics, then you know that capitalism is not, in and of itself, a perfect and foolproof system. When a company is able to develop a monopoly on something, particularly a product or service that is vital to the people in a community, then there’s a great risk of harm simply because the monopolistic company can set whatever price they want on their product or service, since there aren’t competing companies to keep a check on rising prices; similar problems…

Spinning My Wheels

personal, teaching, toledo 2014.07.31 Sean Shannon 1 Comment

There have been times when I’ve had to rush just to get a blog up so I don’t go a whole calendar month without blogging, but I’ve never had to do it under this level of sleep deprivation. My life has gotten incredibly hectic in the past few months, and even though I’m on break from teaching for the next two and a half weeks, I’ve got so many other things I need to get to while I’m on “vacation” that I’m not getting much…

To Ignore or Acknowledge

arts, personal 2013.02.01 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

One of the reasons I haven’t blogged much in recent weeks is that I started doing performance art this past December. I’d never done performance art before, despite the avenues and opportunities it opens up to explore things in ways that are more difficult to explore in other media. I think this is in part because I’ve never had such a compelling opportunity to explore performance art before (or maybe I just never noticed previous opportunities), but my shyness undoubtedly played a part in not…