I have been unsuccessfully job hunting for over four years now. I had a decent job. It paid enough, was mildly interesting, and I was good at it. Then, a little more than five years ago, the organization made some changes which eliminated my department. They found a new position for me, but it was…
This is part one of a two-parter. I don’t think they need to be read together, but they will reinforce each other. Part two is here. I’ve always wanted something for other people. I think they would be happier, and I think society would be better off. In my head, I use the word normal….
To whom it may concern, Like most Americans, my health is important to me. Also like most Americans, I am not wealthy. Put these two things together and that makes health insurance important to me. If anything serious happened, I could not pay for treatment without insurance. What’s worse, I wouldn’t even be able to…
Every job has its tools. My first work experience was as a paper carrier when I was ten or eleven. I had a big sack that went over my shoulder to carry the papers. I also had a hat, gloves, a jacket, boots, sneakers, and rain gear. All of these tools helped me do my…
Major League Baseball made the decision to move the 2021 All-star Game out of Atlanta because of the new Georgia voting laws. This is absolutely the right decision, but I have to admit to being a little surprised. It’s been a long time since Jackie Robinson, and in my experience, MLB can’t even make the…
My dad sent me a headline, “Court sides with professor who repeatedly misgendered trans student” from Inside Higher Ed. The article talks about a professor who is suing his college because he was reprimanded for treating a trans student differently than his other students. Apparently his habit was to call students “Ms.” or “Mr.” He…
Eric Schwitzgebel wrote a recent blog post called Love Is Love, and Slogans Need a Context of Examples. The post makes the point stated in its title. Slogans, taken on their own, are mostly meaningless. If you took someone with no knowledge of the fight for marriage equality in the US, and said to them,…
Credit is probably the biggest scam in human history. That’s a big claim, so I want to clarify a bit. I am not talking about credit in the accounting sense, credits and debits. Those are fine. I’m also not talking about the list of names that runs after a show or movie. I actually like…
Apparently, based on my Twitter feed, something happened yesterday that I didn’t know or care about. The result is people venting their outrage on social media today. This caused some rather old memories to come back to the surface. I want to talk about those memories. I used to work at Borders Books and Music…
This is a piece I’ve been wanting to write for ages. I’ve never really known how to do it, though. The dilemma is that I have to talk about what I don’t want people to talk about. There just isn’t any way to do that without talking about it. I feel like a hypocrite talking…
