Results of Ruminations

Drama is a natural part of life, and I don't mean the time spent on stage. Plans are laid and, like those mice and men, often go awry. We soldier on, of course, feeling as though there's some catharsis somewhere, though the curtain seems to have dropped acts ago. It can be difficult to tell if we're living a sequel, prequel, or the main event. I felt the curtain drop on a cherished aspiration when Justin was fired from his job at Maeser. He and I were planning on working together on a Concurrent Enrollment Shakespeare class that would give college credit to the seniors who participated. We wanted to tackle three or four plays, plus some other, contemporary works, all within a framework of improving the writing. I'm not privy to the reasons why Justin was let go, but with his departure--and the degree he had--the class had to be cancelled. I was bothered by it, in part because I'd lost a mentor and a friend, and also because a dream of being able to focus exclus...

I always wanted a baby girl. I don't know why--maybe it's because I grew up with two brothers, and was already seven when my sister finally came. Maybe it's because I am a self-proclaimed feminist (which is convenient, because it means I get to be a feminist on my own terms--a very feminist thing to do, I'd say) and would like to raise a girl who understands her value comes less from her chromosomes and more from her humanity. Maybe it's because the only names I like are female names. With my first born, because of his heart condition, we had to decide quickly on a name. It wasn't required; we just couldn't keep referring to "the baby" without our throats sticking. Picking a name simplified an already too-complicated experience. Since Gayle and I have been together since our junior year in high school, we'd often joked that we'd name any kid we had "Peter Bruce Dowdle", after our two favorite superheroes (Peter Parker as Spider...

I love to write. Of non-school related writings, I've poured more than a million words into different keyboards throughout my life, and the number certainly increases if we look back at all I've done in high school and college. One of my earliest memories, in fact, is hammering on a typewriter in my grandmother's basement, cranking out a poor excuse for a story on a single sheet of crayoned-over paper. I wrote novels throughout high school--mostly Spider-Man fan-fic--and so I have to divide my writing 'career' as pre- and post-graduation. Since I left high school, I have written one Spider-Man novel and four fantasy novels: Impetus, Words of the Silenced, Tales of the Flame, and Writ in Blood . The Spider-Man book feels legitimate to me, if only because actual novels are published in the Marvel Universe all of the time, so I was only writing in the market I wanted to publish in. Or something like that. The four fantasy novels, however, are all responses to ...

Ever since Hamlet had become my favorite play, I didn't want to teach it. I feared that I could never express what the play has come to mean to me, how brilliantly it works, and how strongly I feel about it. I also worried that, by exposing myself too much to one play, some of its magic would be lost. I ended up being right about all of that. When I started at Maeser, my co-worker--who taught the same curricula as I--let me know that we would teach Hamlet as part of the year's study. I was happy, for despite my misgivings, it was an exciting thing for me to experience again. It had been a couple of years since I'd seen Brian Vaughn's version, and rereading it for the class made me excited. Not two or three months earlier, I had received an email from the now-defunct bookseller Borders. It let me know that Kenneth Branagh's four-hour film version was now available on DVD. I closed my computer, told Gayle I was going out for a bit, and got in the car. After bu...