As I was cleaning/organizing our office closet the other day (read: moving boxes around and not really doing much else), I found a hockey jersey that was one of my prized possessions when I was a teenager. A lot of my friends and I owned hockey jerseys and some owned what the NHL shop calls …
Category: Reflections
Spare me the woo
Photo credit: https://bestpicko.com/ So I meditate every morning. It's something I've been doing for years, and when the app I use--Insight Timer--said they were having a "refresh and reset" challenge for January 2024, I decided to give it a try. Why not? It was free, the meditations were ten minutes, and I do it every …
Personal Archaeology 27: Voices Inside
My "collection" of student newspapers from high school. The first one is from September 1992; the last is from June 1995. In my senior year of high school, I decided I wanted to be a writer, and I figured that the easiest way to make that happen was to go into a career in journalism. Why that …
Complaining is my Default Setting
There's a scene in The Matrix where Agent Smith is villain monologuing at Morpheus and he says: "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some …
Personal Archaeology 25: Pictures You Never Took of Things That Are No Longer There
It's September 11, which means that my social media feeds have more than one commemorative status. They're not as abundant this year as they were last year, which marked 20 years since the attacks, so I didn't find myself facing as many eagles, flags, and "Never Forget" posts as usual. That's made scrolling a little …
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Personal Archaeology 22: On College, Philosophy, Love, Friendship, and Acceptance
So I have been part of a listserv for My So-Called Life fandom for 20 years. The emails flowed from a trickle to a complete stop years ago when a number of us shifted over to social media or moved on altogether, but back in October, it sprang to life again for a little while. …
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Pretense, Joy, and the Residue of “Cool”
Stop making fun of adult women who read YA; stop making fun of men who take a childlike delight in things. There's no law that says we have to become stuffy and boring as we age. Let people find joy where they can.Boze Harrington "It's Cool, California" by Duncan H is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 I cannot remember …
The Freedom is Tyranny of the To-Do List III: The Domination
So I was talking to my therapist this week about my issue with long-term projects with a "large" starting point. I used the analogy of a cluttered room (of which I have more than one in the house)--you know you have to start somewhere, but it all looks so overwhelming that you find yourself throwing …
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More than “Just a …”
So I almost started a podcast about teaching. No, really. I was in my fourth block last week and while my students worked on a reading assessment, I spent a good half hour filling Post-It notes with the outline, format, and topics for a podcast called Ninth Period, which would be conversations about being a …
Personal Archaeology 17: When I Was A Teacher Blogger
On my phone, there's a screencap from an old Innovative Educator post that begins "The unspoken truth about teaching writing in school is that few people doing so are writers themselves."* The first two paragraphs of the post I screencapped. I removed distinguished characteristics of the blog, but you can Google all of this to …
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The Uncollecting 