Results of Ruminations

Counting this post, I have five remaining essays on the Results of Ruminations blog. This isn't to say that I'm giving up my non-fiction writing--that isn't changing at all--but I will be shifting over to my author website, stevendowdle.weebly.com . This is a mixed bag for me, but I think it's time to start generating more content in the place that I'd like to see people visit. While I'm not an SEO guru or anything like that--and, it seems, I'd probably be better off outright buying the domain to let it start percolating through the search engines--I feel that having visitors to a Blogger site isn't that worthwhile. I don't pretend that someone will read an essay I write, then think, "What else has this kid written besides essays?" and will then try to find my website. But if they're already there and want to look around? Then it's easy. I have additional features on my website that aren't on the blog. For example, there are...

Moments of mortality strike in ways that we rarely anticipate. While terminal diseases or the advancement of age can give a person the opportunity to prepare for the final departure, too often it happens abruptly and shockingly. A coworker of mine came close to losing his life in March when he was struck by a truck whilst riding his motorcycle. As he's said since then, one gains a new perspective on the priorities of life when that happens, and things that supposedly mattered turned out to not matter nearly so much. On Facebook yesterday, the sad new came to my attention that one of my high school friends, Dylan Thornton was killed in an accident on I-15, the interstate that connects the state from its Idaho border down to its southern extremes. I was never particularly close to Dylan, but he was definitely within my broader circle of friends. Back in the late nineties, we spent a number of evenings together. We made jokes in class. We were part of each other's dance groups...

When younger, I read a lot of different genres of fiction. I stayed up late reading Goosebumps , like most kids of the nineties, but I also read Young Adult "classics" like Island of the Blue Dolphin, The Cay, and It's Like This, Cat.  I would try some of the bigger stories, but even Alice in Wonderland  was too strangely written for me to really engage with it. I read a lot of Redwall  books as I edged out of elementary school, and Anne McCaffery's world was large in my imagination by the end of sixth grade. Mr. Soto, my sixth grade teacher, read to us the first book of the Prydain Chronicles, which I instantly snatched up and read on my own. (That reminds me: I want to reread those books.) I read novelizations of video games ( Castlevania ftw) and movies ( Hook ). By the time I hit middle school, I was sometimes buying books of movies I couldn't see because they were rated-R, gaming the system as only a ninth-grader could. I picked up some Robotech  to go alon...

Along with my analysis of buying books , there's also something about getting  and having  that are interesting to me. As my eyes rove about my office, I notice things that I have that I like to know that I have but don't know if I'll ever put a lot of time into using them. For instance, I love having more copies of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare . I don't need  another copy any more than I could use another car, but I'm not about to say no to one. (Since I started the new Shakespeare class , I had to get a new copy of The Complete Works . No choice in the matter. Greater good.) Even though I may not use the new acquisition, I'm glad that I have it. This isn't always the case. A student once gave me one of those metal statute kits. You know the type: They look like they're made out of tin foil but turn out to be razor blades embedded in metallic stencils? Y'know, these things: The only way this would be accurate is if the hand on the...

A new meme has been circulating through Twitter in which a guy with his girlfriend is caught "appreciating" another girl's look. The mutability of the meme is that the labels of each part can vary. The one I saw that I liked the most, and what inspired this essay, is this one: Yeah, basically. I got it from this tweep .  There's an allure to a book. Bookstores are quasi-sanctified ground for me, with the library-esque reverential feeling of speaking in Sacrament Meeting whispers, the particular smell of books and (often) coffee invoking a specific attitude both putting me in a specific mindset. Bookstores are less places to buy and something and more experiences to be enjoyed. Because of where I live, I don't get to go to bookstores as often as I'd like (read: Daily), but I'm not so far away that I can't go whenever I really need to. My favorite was Borders, but that died the death a decade or so ago, so while I still pine for their weekly coup...

I'm not particularly tired today. Considering that today is the first day of school for my boys and the first worthwhile day for me, that's a bit of a surprise. Also, I made my wife a steak-and-potatoes dinner (with a nice spinach-and-strawberry side salad...I'm into hyphenated dishes, apparently) which we enjoyed whilst the boys played video games, so that added to the stresses of a complicated schedule, a lot of "getting used to working" vibe, and other typical minutiae, it's definitely a surprise that I'm not tucked into bed by 9:00. But I didn't title this post "Fumes" because I'm tired, it's because I'm mentally drained. There was a little more effort in the thought department than I am used to, if only because I tried a lesson plan I've never done before (I think it went pretty well), and my new Shakespeare class is going to keep me on my toes. These intellectual strains are taxing. I'm used to that, but only onc...

It is confusing that, despite being decades away from an agrarian America, we still use our agrarian calendar for schooling. It's easy to see how we got this way: The system that pushed us through the Industrial Revolution, and was retooled for the post-war baby boom has a momentum to it. As childhood increased in value, nostalgia for one's own childhood drives desires to keep the traditions enjoyed from the idyllic portion of one's life in the bloodstream of the next generation. "We always did this when I was a kid," is one of the reasons that twenty-first century children are hauled off to visit national parks, camp in the forest, or any number of other options. Entire industries build themselves off of this tendency. We're crushed by the weight of that history and tradition. We've codified the laws to ensure that there are a certain number of days on the school calendar (though, and I'm not advocating this, if we dropped all the breaks from the sc...

I'm starting my tenth year as a teacher--all at the same school--which feels arbitrarily momentous. I mean, being a base 10 culture means that something like a decade "means something" and the thing that it means is that we've decided that it means something. There isn't anything inherently powerful, wonderful, or noteworthy about ten consecutive years, but it does feel like I ought to mark it. Thinking back to what I was doing that first teacher training week in 2008 makes me smile. I was so enthusiastic and ungainly, like an evangelizing foal. I mean, I love my job--and I've loved it since the beginning--but I was a pretty lousy teacher back when I started. I cringe at the mistakes I made, the assumptions I had, the poor teaching choices I selected. One of the things that I remember about that year was when I had to take charge of a break-out session for the students. Back then, we gathered the two hundred or so students for a welcome assembly, then sent...

I'm clawing through my memories, trying to remember the books that I loved as a kid. See, my two older boys love listening to audiobooks (whilst reading along) when we're in the car. It's a great pacifier, too--they don't argue or fight or wiggle too much, because the books keep them occupied and focused. Plus they help them improve their reading, and it gives me something to do whilst driving. Since the daily commute equates to about an hour a day, that's pretty good. Though there are more Pern books, I kind of don't want to revisit McCaffery's special planet again for a while. The emotional ending of All the Weyrs of Pern is so perfect I'd rather let it rest for a while, as I mentioned before . Being "done" with the series for the nonce, we scoured the library for the better part of an hour, trying to find the next set of books to read/listen to. I managed to score a digital audio copy of Redwall , by Brian Jacques. Frustratingly, there wer...

Having just returned from a week-long vacation to southern Utah, I feel like I ought to make some sort of note about what happened whilst away. After all, I had a fantastic experience in California and I wrote about that . But I'm hesitant to do so, for two reasons. Number One I was saddened by the fact that, of the four plays I saw at the Utah Shakespeare Festival this year, I only saw two written by the Bard himself. Both of those were...not the best I've seen. By a long stretch, actually. The two non-Shakespeare plays, Shakespeare in Love  and the gut-busting Shakespeare's Long Lost First Play (Abridged)  were superlative. The former was what you get in the film, minus the full-fledged nudity, with a bit more development of Kit Marlowe as a character that paid off well at the end. The latter was a love letter to Shakespeare in the most irreverent way possible, doing a mashup of "early drafts" of all his plays and characters, ending the first act with a wate...

Nestled in the foothills of Provo, beneath the gleaming white Y that's painted on the face of the mountain, a water park gurgles thirstily to itself. This is Seven Peaks Water Park, a place that I have been going to, almost every summer, since I was I don't know how old (the old park, Raging Waters, falling out of favor). Now that I have children of my own, a modest budget, and ample summer time, we decided to visit Seven Peaks and swim around for a few hours this morning. As we pulled in, my boys--who were rather excited about the day's activity--wondered aloud about the parking situation. "Pay When You Leave?" asked my seven year old, reading the sign in the parking lot. "What does that mean?" "Instead of paying right now, we'll pay on our way out," I said. "How much does it cost?" he said (I imagine; this is partially paraphrased). "Seven dollars." "Wow! That's a lot!" "Yup." I gu...

Time: 11:04am. Timer: 25 minutes. Go. Case #1 Here's a thing I've been thinking about: Fame. Part of it comes from the book I started listening to this morning, But What if We're Wrong? . I'm still early in the book (about an hour and a half so far), but there are ideas that are challenging and interesting. It's part futurism, part history, part critical analysis--definitely up my alley, even if it does make me uncomfortable with some of the implications of the cheerily described tendencies of humanity. Klosterman begins by talking about Moby-Dick , one of my favorite novels. I've read it once in college (where it ought to be read, if only so that the worthwhile conversations that the book inspires can have regular space; in lieu of college, a good, dedicated book club could tackle the Whale over the course of, say, three or four meetings), then half again whilst playing a Batman video game. It's not easy to read by any stretch, and its purpose is far...

There's something that I really want to talk about, but I don't know if there's ever a place or venue in which I should. I know that I shouldn't talk about it here or on Twitter, as I have students who read both. Even if I don't share such an essay online, it'd be  online, archived and ready for viewing. It isn't that I think that this Topic is so horrible or scandalous that students shouldn't read it, but rather I don't know if I want to talk about this Topic with them. I could verbalize it; make my wife suffer through my poorly constructed ideas and rambling sentences. That's the most likely outlet, but I don't know what I expect by airing this Topic, so I don't know if it will help or hinder my feelings. Additionally, it's difficult to know when to have important conversations, what with the differences in patience, energy levels, and emotional states of the different participants. Sometimes, I'd really like to talk about som...

I happened upon Verso Books '* summer sale and picked up five books for a buck each. I bought five ( General Intellects, Beneath the Streets, and The Spectacle of Disintegration, all   by Mckenzie Wark, Beyond the Pale  by Vron Ware, and In Defense of Lost Causes  by Slavoj Zizek), but I wanted to go a little meta, a little rhizomatic, and talk about one piece, taken out of context, from the beginning of Zizek's book. I've mentioned Zizek before , and he's a fascinating thinker, albeit hard to understand (as much his speech patterns, his lisp, his accent, his thoughts, his writing as anything else about him). Nevertheless, there's a lot about him that I can't help but be attracted to, and when I started off, he hit me with this particular phrase: "the rhizomatic texture of reality" (loc. 93). The broader context is that he's going off on the idea that, because there are no more "big ideas", some think that "we need 'weak though...

This last week, my family and I went to Anaheim in order to worship at the Altar of the Great Mouse. We had a lovely time, visiting both Disney Parks for a couple of days each. My youngest is four years old and hadn't been to Disneyland yet, so it was enjoyable to see how excited he was to see the parks. We managed to squeeze in a viewing of Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2  before the trip, so he was particularly happy at the frequent banners showing off Baby Groot. My seven-year-old was only disappointed when we went on "slow rides" (which, I guess, would be like Pinocchio or Snow White?) because he is--and I didn't know this--a roller-coaster fiend. Big thrills are big for him, apparently. Additionally, he lost a tooth while there, which not many people can claim. Lastly, my oldest (he's 10 now), simply loved the whole thing--except for leaving and when we got after him for breaking his friend's wheelchair (my son has half a heart, so we put him in a wheelch...

I've long recognized that I have dichotomous tastes. A life-long fan of comics (mostly superhero comics, but there are some others that I appreciate), video games, and parts of anime, I've grown up subsisting on a steady diet of the fantastic. The Chronicles of Prydain  formed a background of middle grade and young adult fantasy (since Harry Potter  wasn't around--and when he showed up, I was anti-Potter), with Anne McCaffery's worlds filling in the gaps. I watched some Star Trek  with my mom, thought Star Wars  was fine (until it wasn't, ruined by constant viewings of the VHS tapes by my little brother--to the point it bred a bit of antipathy in me about them), and I read Animorphs . Both science fiction and fantasy swirled throughout much of my early life. Because of my obsessive personality, I definitely focused on Spider-Man a lot more than other properties, relying on that fusion of science fiction/fantasy that, frankly, has always been the most comfortable ...

Note: To discuss the themes of Cars 3 and look at how they affected me, I have to talk about the end of the movie. In that sense, I'm spoiling the film...or, at least, the film's plot . Don't read if you don't want to (which is always the way it works, obviously), but I feel like there's more to this movie than the story and whether or not it's "spoiled". And though I believe that, I wanted to make this paragraph a little longer to ensure that no one catches an eyeful of spoilers that they didn't intent.  Major spoilers. ( Source ) Pixar's third entry into its Cars  franchise is significantly better than Cars 2 , in large part because Mater isn't around very much at all so the story instantly improves. Okay, that's probably not fair. Cars 2  had some endearing zaniness, and the chance to expand the world of the franchise was a natural step: First film, bring the urban to the rural; second film, bring the rural to the urban. Both ...

I went to a family gathering to celebrate the Fourth. The gathering was family and the host family's friends and neighbors. As a result, I felt a Mr. Darcy, disinclined to extend myself or get to know anyone beyond my own party. We were there early because we brought supplies, so I decided to pass the time by reading some of my summer reading, a short book that I'm still trying to parse my feelings about. Maybe I'll write something about it later. Anyway, despite my mixed feelings about the book, it was a straight forward enough read that I was motivated to read a lot of it. I passed a good portion of the evening reading, which hasn't happened much lately and it was nice to use the time in such a pleasurable way. Sometime before the fireworks started, one of the older attendees interrupted my concentration to urge me away from the book. On one hand, this is a good piece of advice: if one is at a party, one ought to party. In fact, had he wanted to sit down ...

Like Harry Baker  (start at 1:29), I like people. This is easy to say in general, because there are some specific humans that I have little respect or appreciation for beyond the simple truth that we're all connected--the beautiful and the despicable. And considering the unflagging pessimism that louers over my heart and the tumultuous sea of depression that too often capsizes me in its troughs, this is no small thing. Indeed, it's the love of people--more than love of self--that keeps me around. That isn't to say that I am in a perpetual state of desiring suicide--quite the opposite; I don't want this ride on Earth to end, and thinking of "the undiscovered country" propels me through more of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy than is probably healthy and a more-than-white-knuckle-grip on however many numbered breaths I will yet claim. But that doesn't mean that I haven't thought about leaving the world on my own terms. I was ...

What was your first album? Not the first one you listened to, but the first one you wanted and, therefore, received? Purchased or got as a gift? When I was in sixth grade, my music teacher, Mr. Harvey, introduced us to a new album that he was enjoying called Return to Pooh Corner . It was by a guy named Kenny Loggins (whom I didn't know and hadn't heard of but, since my dad was a musician, I figured--in that 11-year old logic that a sixth grader possesses--that the two men likely worked together). That Christmas, I asked for my first album. Today, my Spotify "Discovery Weekly" playlist pulled up " The Last Unicorn " from the Return to Pooh Corner album and I decided to listen to it. Wow. It sounds like a theme song that belongs on a late eighties' animated film, which is good, because that's exactly what it's covering. I didn't like the cartoon (it scandalized me when it said "damn", as if I were back in 1939 when Gone ...