A Way Forward: Two Stories
I want to tell you guys something. Two things, actually. They both happened in the last quarter. They are not unusual things, but they happened to me directly. I see them as things to learn from, to...
View ArticleA short story
Hello, I woke up this morning with a memory floating around my head. If you know me in real life, it’s probably a story I’ve told you before, but I’ve never actually committed it to paper, and I want...
View ArticleWhen Your People Are Hurting: Part I
Part I: Near In the summer of 1999, I was living in New York and pursuing the beginnings of a dream career. That same summer, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake jilted my home country of Taiwan. It was big...
View ArticleNew Year’s Eve in Morro Bay
I met some people over the two days and a night we were in Morro Bay. Well. That’s not entirely true. I met one person. Watched another from afar. And found an item that helped me to write the first...
View ArticleYogis I have loved
When Mr. Gooddirt and I went to our first-ever yoga class in Chicago in the mid-2000s, we only knew a little bit of what to expect. We hoped it would change us from being tight-hamstringed runners and...
View ArticleMy students want to read more, and it is a huge win for two reasons
Hello, everyone. This will be a short post, but I have been thinking about this thing that happened since it happened, and so I want to share it with you. Some of you may know that I teach creative...
View Article“Don’t be an asshole” can’t be the full moral of this story: a blog post with...
This weekend, I taught for a couple of days at the incredible Mt. SAC Culturama. I’ve been involved in this event for four or five years now, and it’s an event that never fails to leave me feeling so...
View ArticleOn the demonstration of joy
I want to take a second to talk to you about joy. So we can be on the same page, here is an official definition of it, from my favorite dictionary, Merriam-Webster: This a fine, workable definition for...
View ArticleIt’s broke: Love it enough to fix it
When I was in college, eleventy trillion years ago, I was editor-in-chief of the paper which served the five colleges that made up our undergraduate system. I think I did that for a year or so. Our...
View ArticleKeep your eyes open for mentors: Part 8 of live-blogging _The Person You Mean...
Kyle’s parents were believers, whom Kyle describes as “well-meaning white people.”…Before Kevin [Kyle’s husband], Kyle does not remember talking about race at the family dinner table. Kyle says, “[My...
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