Another of my favorite books

Never thought that I would not like to spend time working on the blog because my life-work-balance is out of wack. Too much reading of other people's work and giving feedback drains my brain. So now I have decided to return to reading some of my favorite books to help me focus on what is important in this daily cacophony of social media tweets, posts, pins, etc. These short stories will allow me to finish one at a time. I remember reading these short stories for the first time in a Friday morning Literature seminar in college. Getting up for an 8 am class was hard, bit for the particular professor, I did not mind the commute and doing the work. It was all worth it.

A new collection about Grace Paley's writing

This reader includes some of her most important short stories as well as essays, which are timely as they were in the 1970s and 1980s when originally published.

Lost in Virtual Reality

It has been a while. Trying to explore weebly, wordpress, and google docs for various purposes has been quite the journey. Canvas from instructure required me to pay close attention to online teaching and learning since UCF is now using this CMS for all its classes. It has been fun working with it and I am looking forward to utilize the new tools and apps more in the near future. Now I decided to return to the original online presence and rediscover it again. Shannon Carter and her presentation in my department recently reminded me of the exigence of my initially starting the blog in the first place. So here we go again. Wish me luck!

Seasons of Love

The musical RENT and its super opening in the movie:





LyricsRent Cast - Seasons Of Love lyrics

Just another day!

Encountering people is what makes life worth living. This has become one of my motivating forces to stay afloat and keep moving.

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At this point I should confirm for the attentive reader that the critical thinking discussion has been replaced with an in-depth analysis of my personal live. Officially, we are working through a few problems to make sure our relationship can continue in a new direction and prosper. Nurturing that relationship has become our main goal, primarily due to the fact that more often than not the everyday grind had slowly but surely taken out of life any balance. Get up, work out, teach, grocery shop, come home, go to sleep. This common thread entered a new day in the morning and every Sunday night a knot marks the beginning of the next week. So what is coming now in the days and weeks ahead are meditations which address and deal with fear and hope, the ups and downs of the roller coaster of feelings, the anxiety of loss and the happiness of reunion.

Fall

Looking back at last fall, I cannot help but realize that the happiness I experienced was definitely not shared. Compared to falling in live, wildly combining two lives into one and not knowing how one could have ever lived without the other, this process of living in two different dwellings forges little holes here and there in that fabric which had wrapped the two into one. Now I have to learn to live as a single again. I receive tips on how not to fall behind my work and not to spend long mornings in bed. Short text messages tell me to pick up the pieces and put them on paper so that I could move on in my life. Go and have dinner with friends. Ask Donna and Vicky to come to the house for a sandwich. Meet for coffee with your office mate or revive the tradition of having lunch dates at Qdoba every Tuesday. Longingly, I wait for an invitation from the speaker on my phone instead. We will talk and stay in touch, I hear loud and clear. We will talk. This line elevates me off the ground, where I hang suspended in the air tied with the remains of the garment to invisible columns that once I considered the foundation for this relationship.

On Track

He said that I did not exactly held him in bondage. He never meant to say it that way and is afraid that it did not come out right. But he proceeded to advice me on writing my thoughts and doubts down on paper, in a journal or something like that. This personal space would free me from thinking too much about our conversations at the house and across town. Anyway, I read too much into his statements about how he feels about the current status of our relationship. That's what he keeps telling me. At the same time he falls short of telling me where to go from here or how to resolve some of the issues. Living in the Here and Now has become his new life motto. No worries about others, except his mom who still does not know much about what has been going on. Since December 19 I at least got the facts via facebook.

writing to analyze

During the last couple of days I got involved in a few discussions with a couple of my students. Writing to learn about an issue is so hard to do, they complained. It takes time and one has to think about so much. One of the students uttered with a sigh that he wishes sometimes not to make things so complicated in his writing. To him critical thinking is a curse, he says, because he constantly reevaluates his writing, doubting his original thinking skills and worrying about meeting the standards he set out for himself. These thoughts appear in a different light when I read in the Harvard Crimson how teachers should focus more on developing critical thinking skills in their students. What this newspaper and others who express similar demands seem to forget is that it takes time to correlate, associate, compare, and contrast issues; that is takes time to see patterns developing and paradigms shifting in a repository of texts. And honestly, tests to enter graduate school do not ask for these problem solving skills. They test dichotomies and their perpetuation in American society. If you can determine the opposite of one then you pass the test.

politics on a t-shirt