Something New

personal, toledo Leave a comment

One of the dichotomies of my personality I regularly struggle with is my inherent need to experience new things, especially so they can influence my art, and my seemingly-genetic predisposition to constancy and frugality (which I completely blame my father for). I’ve never believed that “write what you know” is bulletproof advice for writers (pretty much every “writing rule” I’ve ever heard is made to be broken), but I don’t think there’s any denying that a broader range of life experiences provides artists with a…

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Rainbows of Youth

personal, toledo Leave a comment

As this year’s Australian Football League season reaches its conclusion, and my beloved Essendon Bombers look all too likely to miss out on a finals appearance yet again, I’m reminded of one of the reasons why I chose Essendon as my team when ESPN started airing VFL highlights shows on Saturday mornings (just before my cartoons came on) in the eighties, and I became so fascinated with this strange sport unlike anything I’d ever seen in America. I had basically no knowledge of Australian geography…

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Let Kids Be Kids, FFS

politics, rhetoric, teaching, weather Leave a comment

No more snow days: School district replaces wintry days with off with online classes (fox59.com) Back in 2014, when France made it illegal for companies to contact their employees about work-related business after six in the evening, a lot of pundits here in America used the opportunity to point out how the Internet, and the growing availability of powerful smartphones and tablets, were changing the fundamental nature of work and jobs. Plenty had already been written about how new technology was eating up people’s free…

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Storm Junkie

mom, personal, toledo, weather Leave a comment

A love of thunderstorms runs in my family, or at least on Mom’s side of the family. From my earliest days, before we even had cable so the Weather Channel could let us know what to expect and when (as much as weather forecasts are ever accurate), the arrival of a thunderstorm at our house often meant gathering in the living room, so we could look out the big windows as the clouds darkened and then flashed with lightning. Especially in the years before the…

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The Air Up Here

food, mom, personal, toledo Leave a comment

Mom was, by anyone’s standards, extremely devoted to those of us in her blood family. Although her parents were hoping that she could turn her musical talents into a full-time career when she was in her teenage years, that never really came to pass, especially after she became pregnant at nineteen. I can’t speak much to the first ten years she was a mother, because I hadn’t been born yet, but she often did everything she could, and usually more than she should have, to…

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