The Blog

I thought I knew what the word “surreal” meant but lately I, actually all of us, have been given a crash-course in surrealism. Here’s the dictionary definition:

As we consider social distancing (or as the prescient Moe Howard of the Three Stooges said “Spread out knuckleheads!”) I am reminded of a book that we assigned to our freshman Foundations 1 classes in 2016 and 2017. The book is Station 11 by Emily St.

Paul Ford, a contributing writer for Wired Magazine posed this thought in a recent article: “It’s terrible that we’re headed into global climate catastrophe, but then again, we’re only facing doom because for 75 years no one started a nuclear war.”

As I sit in meetings, classes, discussions, deliberations and family urgencies, I contemplate my life’s minutes; not hours, not days, not months, not years but MINUTES. When I was a younger person, it was necessary to commit to due diligence. These chunks of my time were spent on learning and adapting. I tried to get along with everyone and listen to the wisdom of my colleagues, students, neighbors, parents, siblings and children. Truly, each has a role to play in my theater. It was fruitful to get along or even tacitly agree when at times I didn’t agree at all.

Well, we are three weeks into the spring 2020 semester at USF and I find that my enthusiasm for teaching has not diminished after all of these years.  Although students have changed in many ways since I started teaching at the University of St. Francis in 1978, I still find the majority of students to be enthusiastic, willing to learn and be responsible enough to meet course deadlines.

If you have aspirations to write scripts for a media outlet, you are entering a golden age of episodic story-telling, aka, television. (Although it’s not really TV anymore, at least not in the sense that anyone before millennials knows.) But episodic stories; short-run, long-form and everything in-between and especially talented people to write them, are in great demand.