Results of Ruminations

During my sojourn south this summer, I did what I now consider an important tradition for my writing retreats: I bought a new album. Now, I should say that when I say "new", I don't mean "newly released" or even, necessarily, new to me. I mean, I buy what I'm interested in hearing at the time, regardless of its newness. In this case, I picked up Metallica by, no surprise here, Metallica. I've always liked the radio friendly, but I was curious to see if there was something more on the album itself. And though I listened to a podcast about the album Master of Puppets, I wasn't sure if I wanted their earlier stuff, middle of the road, or new sounds. I went with the safe bet and snagged their self-titled (often called "the Black album"). I regret it not. The album is fantastic, but that's old news. (The thing came out in, what, '91?) The cuts that didn't make it to mainstream radio aren't surprises ("Throug...

I took my kids to the Walmarts nearby in order to buy not one, not two, but three  birthday presents for my second son's friends, all of whom are celebrating their birthdays over the next three or four days. This wasn't a big deal, save that we were 1) in Walmart and 2) I forgot my wallet in the car, necessitating hauling all of the kids from the toys section (which, in case you were wondering, yes, my four year old was sobbing as we left because I wouldn't buy him a Spider-Man glove) and back out to the pinnacle of suburban success, the minivan. Not my actual car, but it gives a sense. Source Wallet obtained, I trekked back into the store, reclaimed the birthday presents, bought the kids some over-sugared, under-nutritioned drinks, and headed out to the parking lot. As we walked, I teased my oldest about running into a sign, and pretended to be a bee, buzzing and stinging him. We marched along, everyone holding someone's hand, and arrived safely at the car. The...

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...

After having finished both But What if We're Wrong ?  and White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America , I've been thinking a lot about stuff I was wrong about. It led to the question of this post--what are you wrong about?--and, because it requires a level of self-awareness as well as a view of history and current events, it's not really something that I can throw at my students and mull it over with them. (Odds are good that I'll toss that at one of my coworkers, however, and we'll see where that gets us.) The thing about this question that makes it hard for me to get a grip on is that I know I'm not asking what I regret. "I was wrong to order from Burger King" is not my goal with this. Additionally, it's too superficial to say, "I was wrong about my assumptions of the book  Freedom by Jonathan Franzen; it was not a very good read at all, and I was miserable the whole time I tried to read it, eventually abandoning the thing...

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 ...

You likely already know quite a bit about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints if you're reading this blog--particularly if you're a regular reader, as I talk about Mormonism and Mormon life pretty regularly--and since it's Sunday, I wanted to talk about a random observation I had the other week, and it's about wine. See, in the LDS Church, we don't drink sacramental wine; we use tap water (which, incidentally, tastes like pool water at the chapel where I attend) and scraps of donated bread to represent the blood and body of Jesus Christ. I realize that's one more split from mainstream Christianity (but I already wrote about why that doesn't bother me), but I think there's a lot to be said about a thimble of water and a crust of (almost always) white bread to help remind me of the sacrifice of the Christ. The plastic cups are Church made and provided. The bread is donated. ( Source ) Why don't we use wine? In a revelation given t...

Since October 2016, I've disabled comments on my posts. This decision was made rather hastily and comes primarily from the fact that I didn't want to engage with what others had written in  what I had written. That is, I didn't want to spend my writing time writing about what I already wrote when I had more to to write that wasn't being written. Glad we cleared that up. Anyway, I keep the comments off and, though I post my essays on both Twitter and Facebook, I don't usually engage much beyond a like or favorite of comments these essays generate. This stems from a reluctance I have to engage in public conversation. My teaching style is heavily focused on dialogue, discussion, and exploration of ideas; it is called, after all, Socratic Seminar. So why don't I want the same online? For the same reason I don't leave my door open during class and encourage people to walk in and start talking. I get the sense that people don't read through a conversation,...

At the eager age of 21, I married my high school sweetheart. We had known each other since we were 17, she had waited whilst I served a mission in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and was willing and happy and hoping to get married when I returned home. Because I took a two-year hiatus to my education, I was behind her in studies. She graduated a couple of semesters after we wedded, taking a job at a school in the Jordan School District while I rounded out my final year or two of coursework. She had a miscarriage in the summer of 2006, and our first born child came two days before I graduated as part of the class of 2007. Throughout the entirety of our time together as a married couple, we've both worked. In fact, I've never financially supported her. We've worked together to make sure we had enough money, and though I've occasionally earned more than she, it's always been the case that Gayle has provided for the family. Soon after the birth of our first child, I was un...

For the first time in...well, months, really...I don't want to write an essay. There have been times when I didn't know what to talk about. I'd cast my eyes around my office, hoping for some inspiration to strike. My eyes would rove over books that I either remembered or had no memory of, depending on how long it had been since I read them. Most of those that I read I could probably regurgitate some event or other that happened in them, and any of those that I don't have any memory at all are probably those that I haven't actually read them yet. Nevertheless, they often spurred some topic or another. Not tonight. I finished some final thoughts and changes to my first World War I presentation that I'll be putting on tomorrow, which used up a lot of my time. Thinking about what I'm going to have to do to teach a handful of 15 and 16 year olds about the Great War always makes me glum. It's hard because I have a lot (for the lay person) of knowledge abou...

A late Saturday afternoon in the beginning of March means that the sunlight is already slipping toward its bed. The temperature is fish stick quality--frozen in the shade, but broiling in the sunlight--and the lawns all revel in their video-game-brown hues. My neighborhood has the same color palate, to be frank. With the now decades-long interest in beige stucco, the builders have almost made it so that the houses are camouflaged into the background of dead grass and dusty hills. Outside, my boys roll around on their scooters and bikes, zipping in horizontal paths on the sidewalk. Newly minted friends and same-aged cousins join in, and their voices drift into the office through the window that I've opened for the first time since last year. They shout at each other in the high-pitched treble of prepubescence, their lisps and slurs of words bouncing off the houses. Nearby, the main thoroughfare hums in its asynchronous rhythms, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, depending on the ...

I amn't Catholic. In fact, aside from the basics of the religion--which are rather similar to the beliefs of most Christianity--I don't understand a lot about Catholicism. That isn't to say I haven't studied it or tried to map it onto my understanding of the world, of course. Especially when it comes to historical Catholicism, I only have a sense of the most significant doctrines as they pertained to history (no divorce allowed led to the formation of the Anglican Church, for example). But I mix up holy days and I can't remember any patron saints (except for Saint George, because he's the patron saint of England, though I've no idea what he did). To repeat: I'm not Catholic. Neither am I Protestant in any significant way. It's beyond the scope of this essay to consider what Mormonism is (I think the idea of it being a fourth Abrahamic tradition is perhaps the closest analysis), so I'm approaching the tradition of celebrating Lent cautiously a...

I created this blog in June 2008. The world was different: We didn't have a bunch of social media sites that are ubiquitous now; we'd yet to elect an African-American as president--or a reality TV star, for that matter. We didn't really have a grip on "reality TV", either. I had recently left a web design firm where I had worked as a content editor, purchased a new home, and then had my freelance work dry up--leaving me at home with a kid barely over a year old and only half a heart to boot. The other two children of my marriage weren't on the horizon yet, and though I was only a few weeks away from finally getting a teaching job, I didn't know that at the time. So I wrote about a video game I like. Since then, aside from getting established in my job, raising more children, navigating a post-surgery life with my oldest, and countless other achievements and experiences, I find myself daily posting on the same website, stretching myself to write more--...

I got my hair cut today. I try to have that happen about five times a year: During the summer, and then at the end of terms. Term doesn't end for another month, but my hair was getting unmanageable and uncouth (that's right, I called my hair uncouth), so I shelled out $17 and had a professional cut my hair. Haircuts are a strange thing. Unlike almost any other human excretion, hair is visible to everyone.* This is fascinating to me, in part because calling hair "excrement" is what Gertrude says of Hamlet's locks in act 3 scene 4. This makes sense, because it is something that is pushed out of the body as a waste product , though we normally think about it exclusively as fecal. And we have a problem with, like, everything that humans emit. We don't like to think of urine, sweat, tears, blood, saliva, mucus, reproductive fluids, or even human odors. Fingernails can be pretty gross, too, particularly when they're removed from the body and left behind. Whi...

Every year, the Life, the Universe, and Everything Writers Symposium comes to Provo, Utah. I've been attending for eight years now, enjoying the many panels, occasionally purchasing books or what-not from the vendors, and generally passing a pleasant two- or three days. This year, I took a day off from teaching to go, which resulted in about 10,000 words of notes. I do this for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it makes me feel like I'm actively pursuing what it means to be a writer outside  of being in my office. I try to pick panels about topics that I know plenty about (though today's panel on dinosaurs was fun if unenlightening--I covered essentially all the same information in my Winterim last year), but I always wonder what it'd be like to be on one of the panels. Another reason for going is that there can be some good information, to say nothing of networking a little. I'm not particularly gregarious, and I'm immensely self-conscious...

When I was in sixth grade, a new cartoon aired on FOX Kids. It was simply called Spider-Man . I loved this show. Because I was in sixth grade when it came out, my birthday was geared toward a plethora of Spider-Man related merchandise. When I finally got to my big day, I was delighted that I got so many Spider-Man toys. I got the Lizard (a.k.a. Curt Conners, a biologist who lost his right arm--in the Vietnam war in the comics, but for undisclosed reasons in the TV show--and tried to regrow it by fusing his own DNA with reptile DNA), Kraven the Hunter, and a Peter Parker figure. Peter Parker. Complete with camera accessory! Source .  I never got the Scorpion character (bottom left), but the others all ended up in my collection. Source . When I unwrapped Kraven--likely the last one that I received for my birthday--my mom said, noting the slight look of disappointment on my face, "It's good to have some villains for Spider-Man to fight!" This is a true stat...

I'm at the point in my life where I've decided that I definitely don't know as much as I wish, but know sufficient to know that I don't really know anything. In this quasi-Socratic quandary, then, I feel more than a little stuck. I want to learn more, gain more insight, understand more. There simply isn't enough time in the day (or, more importantly, energy in my body) to learn all I'd like to learn. So there's this weird dilemma in my life: On one hand, I want to learn more--insatiably--particularly about the things that I teach. Impostor syndrome is real, and I hate feeling inadequate. But, at the same time, the things which I could/should do to improve myself are always within the "running-on-fumes" level of my abilities. Sickness (like today), coupled with too little sleep (like every day), and a dash of "all the other stuff I gotta do" leave me apathetic about my goals. Why stretch when I'd rather stretch out on the couch and e...

Writers, in their perpetual impulse to spell things out for their audience, have a penchant for advice. I don't know if other professions have this at the same level: Writers' worlds are words, after all, so the idea that they ought to share what they know by writing what they know and thereby both practicing what they preach ("write what you know") and help the next generation of writers at the same time is likely one that appeals to them. I know it does to me. One of the things that published writers ("real writers", as I think of them) often encourage others to do is consider the audience. In terms of technical- and academic writing, I do this with my students all of the time. Considering the audience is one of the bedrock starting places for anyone who wants to communicate. As a teacher of writing, I trot out obvious examples (and think I'm profound for weaving them out of my mouth as I go), things like, "Writing a text message is different th...

Twitter can be a challenging platform. It can drain time, wallow in alt-right poison, and, apparently, provide insights into foreign policy decisions. But it also has connected me with some really amazing people with thoughts and points of view that I wouldn't have any other way. Additionally, by following a handful of people whose points of view are far removed from my experience, I have grown quite a bit as a writer, a thinker, and a person. One of those people is @fangirljeanne, a woman who, based on what she tweets about, loves geek stuff as much as I, and has a really strong sense of how American society interacts with people of color. Since I camouflage with Crisco, I don't really know what it's like to be in love with pop culture that feels incapable or intimidated by the thoughts of representing me in...well, basically everything. So I love her approach to pop culture interpretations, even if I don't always agree with her arguments or conclusions. One thing ...

Despite the fact that my teacher-sense was tingling, I went ahead with a bit of an experiment today. The details aren't really what matters--the kids in one class will try an alternative assignment while the other class will go through my standard set up. Instead, it's the idea of what I'm trying to accomplish with my classes. Last year was a bit of an existential crisis for me in terms of how I teach. (I had already gone through the "Is this what I really want to do with my life?" existential crisis some years before. Thanks, Class of 2014.) I didn't feel like anything was working right, I didn't feel as though my choices, questions, conversations, or techniques were worthwhile. I decided against changing everything, instead trying to streamline what I've done in the past to try to make it more engaging--trimming, consolidating, and tweaking where I felt I could. In an attempt to remain flexible to student desires, I let the classes decide how to ...