It has been a very full quarter. I anticipated this fullness prior to the start of the quarter and took some time to recenter myself and remind myself who and whose I am. Then, I came back home and jumped into a quarter full of teaching, the major conference in my field (the Annual Meeting […]
Category: General
Finding myself
It has been a hard academic year after a couple of years of significant transition. I have felt so incredibly far from myself. And so, I am even the more grateful to find myself at home, in Bordeaux, again. When I was 19 years old, I first came to Bordeaux, France, as an undergraduate student […]
What is Lost; What is Gained — A Reflection on Winter Quarter 2026
Well, I didn’t think that the first 10 weeks of 2026 was going to go quite the way it did. I started out the year on a way to a diagnosis of Graves Disease, clear that I felt unwell, but unsure why. As I enter my fourth week on medication, I am beginning to […]
Weight, Wait, Don’t Tell Me…
I have been carrying a lot of things for a long time. The weight of it all is exhausting. I rarely notice as more and more gets added, little by little, to the load. Often it is me adding things to the load as if it does not exist. The load feels indistinguishable from my […]
My Heart
It’s been a rough 6 weeks in the midst of a tough year. Mostly, rough on my heart. About 6 weeks ago, my resting heart rate, which has been relatively similar for the first 47 years of my life, jumped and kept jumping. It is still very high, and exercise prompts my heart rate to […]
Holding Space and Holding Still for Humanity
I am a runner. In my past, this was literal. I ran cross-country and track in high school and half marathons for several years as an adult before it became more harmful than helpful for my body. What I loved most about running that distance was that, after running for a while, I couldn’t think […]
Unwellness & Opportunities for Unlearning
I’ve been reading mimi khúc’s dear elia and thinking a lot about unwellness in this new year (by the western/ solar calendar). Many things have struck me from the book, but particularly the idea of systemic or structural unwellness which reproduces different forms of unwellness among us all, and diverse types of suffering. Systems (and societies) […]
Moments and Movements
Sometimes imposter syndrome (and scarcity syndrome) is (are) real, bred by isolation within a society that encourages competition and comparison, that wants to gives rise to hyper productive doer drones who operate within mindsets of never being/having/doing enough. Sometimes one can (I can, we can) feel like we’re not doing enough or we’re doing things […]
A Full Heart
Today, at 4pm, I received notice that I have been promoted to Full Professor at California State University, Long Beach. This is not my first rodeo as full professor (I was full professor for a year at another institution when I was on leave from CSULB) and it’s not the last institution I’ll be full […]
Transitions and Transformations
A week ago, I was entering the last 12 hours of my time in Barcelona, at the end of two weeks in Europe which I promised would be the marker of a new phase of my life, a time when I would lean into spaciousness and dreaming, no longer pulled by false urgency and the […]