Results of Ruminations

This is the second time that I'm giving this "timed-write" thing a go. I won't bother linking to my first attempt, since that would be a waste of time. This is probably good practice for tomorrow, when I want to have my students do "writing sprints" for their novels. The idea behind that, which I took from NaNoWriMo is to have a mini competition to write as many words as possible in 15 minutes, post the quantity, and then do it again. You repeat that for about an hour--we'll do 45 minutes in my class--and see how many words you can get. It's interesting, because it really helps you to focus on what you're doing at that very moment, but it's also something that can boost your word count by a lot. When I went on my writing retreat with my writing group friends (which was different than when I went by myself), I suggested giving this a try, but we never got around to it. Heh. When we went as a group, I accidentally left the keys behind. I had ...

With only one exception (that I can think of), I have only ever written nonfiction essays here. Some have been theoretical; others have been historical or political; yet others, personal. But the idea behind that has been pretty straightforward: I write fiction in my novels, so I reserve this space for nonfiction explorations. Nevertheless, I learned one thing that I like to do in my writing, and it's something that I learned how to do here, on this website. I like to write in circles. I don't mean that I like to repeat myself, which I try to avoid in the first place, but it doesn't always work out that way. Instead, I mean that I spend some time thinking up my topic, which I try to put in a unique or thought provoking way. Sometimes, I give the title a pun (my personal favorite is the (I'm)pure  one, simply because it can be read in a variety of ways), or some other twist that makes me, at least, sit up a little straighter. That's the beginning of the circle...

A couple years ago, my wife's friend invited us to a steampunk ball up in Salt Lake City. We're definitely geeks, and we love to cosplay, so the invitation was right up our alley. What we didn't have, though, were costumes to go along with the theme of the dance. So, over the course of about a week, my wife whipped up some quick steampunk-esque costumes. They were quasi-Victorian, had some gears on them, and looked fine and fun. They weren't the most impressive things at the ball, by any stretch, but they did the job. One thing about my wife: When she gets an idea in her head, she wants it done and she wants it done right. Even though we had fun at the ball, she wanted to improve the costumes, to make them more noticeable and eye-catching. The best way to do that was to become more authentically steampunk. I happened across Steampunk'd  on Netflix, which we then began to watch together in the evenings, after the boys were tucked in bed. We're not steampunk c...

The third of my music video essays, I'm going after a band that I don't know at all, Highly Suspect. In fact, I only had their new music video, "My Name is Human", pop up in my YouTube recommendations list because a student had recommended the song to me. This one is '90s grunge released in 2016, so it's a genre that I'm familiar with and listened to a lot as a kid. Nevertheless, I'm tackling a band that I've never listened to, am not familiar with their discography, and, at the time of writing, have only seen the music video a couple of times (because it is so new). Additionally, this one has some swears in it, which I'm not usually down with. There's something in this song and music video, though, and so I'm going to break from my typical MO and let the f-bombs drop. As always, I do recommend watching the video whilst reading the lyrics.  The Set Up Here's the video: And here are the lyrics : Okay I'm feeling the...

So far as human minds can fathom, there is no such thing as the future. Sure, there are things in futurity. We have our calendars, our fixed dates and expectations of what will come to pass. But the future remains unattainable, always turning into now  and then sliding--consumed--into the past. I'm hardly the first person to make this consideration. Indeed, in some ways, contemplating time is one of the core purposes of philosophy . It's also beyond philosophy and into the scientific, with all sorts of possibilities (like the minuscule Planck instant ) embedded within it. People much smarter than I have burrowed into this topic and tried to share their understanding. But since my feeble brain can't necessarily follow their paths, I'll wander around in my own version of what I can comprehend.  And that's this: The entirety of a human's experience is an omnipresent now  that is somehow different than then  but not entirely independent of to come . That is, w...

I got after some students for their behavior recently. Every teacher has a different way of approaching rowdy kids. Some shout. Some ignore it. Others talk to the kids separately. I tend to use a dose of sarcasm that's so heavy that it makes the legs of their chairs bend. It generally takes a long while for me to get to the point that the chatter and conversations in the back of the room interfere too much and I unleash the Sardonic Beast. The result, I believe, is that the students--usually the ones most affected by my vocal vituperations--take offense at the "sudden" chastisement, as though they hadn't been making the class harder to manage for the last however long. When this happens, there's a chilling effect in the room. I often have to use a sharper tone, more precise language, and blunter concepts. I once told students that didn't wear the uniform according to the way they knew they were supposed to that they were lying to me and I didn't apprec...

There's been some hubbub about seven Earth-like planets being discovered nearby (read: 40 lightyears away). Having just finished the Life, the Universe and Everything Symposium--and being a Mormon--this is really interesting to me. The LTUE conference is geared towards aficionados and writers of science fiction and fantasy. The name, of course, comes from the late Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of the panels were geared toward the "science" part of "science fiction." I attended panels about time travel, evolutionary diversity, dinosaurs, and the theory of relativity, to name a few. So alien life, alien worlds, and basically the idea of being in the stars has always been appealing to me. Sure, I love Earth. All my stuff's here. But there's something magical and yearnful (that's not a word, but it ought to be) in the stars. My pining for the extraterrestrial definitely come...

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...

One of the great things about Twitter is that you can find like-minded professionals who have wisdom and wit to share. I follow a chap, Doug Robertson , who wrote an article last September on his blog about having a student teacher and how he does things differently in his class. He teaches fifth grade, which is quite a bit different than my tenth grade stomping grounds. Teenagers require a different type of training than a bunch of barely-double-digits children, so that's to be expected. But there was this part of his essay that stood out to me: Why are so many classrooms basically the same? I mean, I see conversations about taking risks all the time. I see costumes and bulletin boards and book studies about being different. But I don't see a lot of different. One more time, to be perfectly clear, I'm not saying, "why aren't more of you taking the legs off your desks"? I'm saying, "Do you think your room is different?" And is it important to...

A couple of years ago, my family and I watched the entirety of Avatar: The Last Airbender . It's a really well done cartoon from Nickelodeon that still has a pretty strong following, despite the second series, Korra , not quite catching my interest in the same way. During LTUE this year, there was a paper by an undergrad from BYU whose thesis was "Feminism and Avatar: The Last Airbender ." The paper he was presenting wasn't finished, and his primary conceit was really just being explored at this point, rather than being polished and ready for presentation. As an educator, it kind of bothered me that he had come to present a really interesting idea, but hadn't finished the exploration in any depth. While I didn't mind the request for feedback and the general discussion--in fact, I enjoyed that quite a bit--it felt slipshod to have an unfinished product presented at a writing conference. But the conversation definitely got me thinking. The audience was posit...

For the last couple of summers--and looking forward to this upcoming one--I have abandoned my family and retreated to my family cabin in the woods outside of a little central Utah town called Mount Pleasant. It's my "writing retreat", a place I go to in order to more clearly focus on my writing. There are a few steps that I take, which I'm going to outline here, in order to get the most out of the time I'm away. While it's a procedure that's unique to my situation, I know other authors will do similar sorts of things in order to get a lot written at a single time. Whether or not anyone who reads this can use this advice is...well, immaterial. It's out there now. Before I Go Before I go, I make sure that there isn't anything to slow down my work. I spend the week or two building up to the retreat by imagining my daily routine, picturing myself at the keyboard, the smell of the cabin in my nostrils and the sound of my instrumental music playing o...

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...

In a clever and unexpected twist on an old classic, I inverted the concepts of the cliche "practice what you preach" and made it fun and exciting! Aren't you exceedingly diverted? I knew you would be. One of the things about being a teacher that I didn't understand when I was a student was the idea that I sort of expected the teacher to have done what she was telling me to do. "Read this book" had an implied "because I have and it's worth it" to the command. Most of the time, I think that my teachers did what was asked of the students...to a certain extent. I don't think Mrs. White sat down and wrote out note cards for the ten-page research paper assignment back in tenth grade. And I know that Miss Bodily didn't make video summary of Othello  at the end of that play for a project. But one of the things that I've tried to do a little bit throughout the years is to create one of the projects that my students have to do, as it pert...

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...

Have you heard of John Brockman? He has, apparently, made a bit of a living through asking thought provoking questions on his website  and then publishing the responses. Most of the stuff his contributors write is beyond me: I read This Idea Must Die , and much of it had to do with supporting (or refuting) string theory, as well as other quanta concepts that were impossible for my feeble brain to comprehend. What I like about the entire conceit is that there is an openness to the format. Brockman poses a question; scientists, philosophers, and writers answer it; then we get to read what other people think. While it's not dialectical, since the writers don't cross-pollinate, it gives a semi-conversational approach to the same question. Things that others consider important, I never thought of. Areas of my expertise are rather overlooked, which gives me a chance to always feel unsure and out of my comfort zone. Whilst at a bookstore, I happened across another of John Brockman...