No Christmas Tree

My family didn’t put up a Christmas tree this year. It might be a first. As far as I remember, we’ve had a tree every year since Clare was born, and that includes the year we were living in Taiwan. Several factors went into this decision, none of them big enough to...

Complicated Text

Once a year I try to read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. I used to open the book to a random page, but lately have been going straight to the essay “Self-Reliance.” I might go back to my old approach, because “Self-Reliance” has become a dead end for me. Time and again...

Special Professors

I ran into a former colleague at the gym today. The man’s name is Roger Haro, and after fall semester, he will leave the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse to accept a deanship at Northern Arizona University. Talking to him, even for just a few minutes in the...

Nowhere Man

Manyu does not usually read my blog, but I asked her to read my November 14 entry about goals versus no goals to make sure I’d captured her opinions correctly. She said my blog was accurate as far as it went, but I’d failed to explain the rationale behind her...
Steven Simpson