After an incredibly tortuous journey, in August 2014 I defended my dissertation and officially earned my Ph.D., which would be conferred at some point later on. While I’m proud of my tenacity and proud of the research and writing I did, there’s no question that the best part of the whole process was getting to …
Ok, so, honestly? That title is aspirational. I’m really not someone who runs out into the street, arms stretched wide, yelling, “C’mon, failure! Just try to knock me over!” But last night, while I was attending the Chattanooga Women’s Leadership Initiative IMPACT dinner with colleagues from Chattanooga State, the BBC’s Katty Kay said, “Robots are …
I’ve had the privilege of working with personal trainers at several points during my life, always finding this to be an enjoyable and worthwhile investment of time and money. It’s not so much that I don’t like working out; in fact, I really love it, finding workouts (especially weight training) to be empowering. I build …
This is my third annual best books post (see 2016 and 2017, respectively), and it’s a doozy! This year, I began using Goodreads to track my books, which has become WAY more addictive than I would’ve guessed. (In the same way my DVR is like a to-do list for entertainment, Goodreads has become a to-do …
I remember being scolded as a child for using the word “hate,” a word with such emotional charge my mother assured me it was not warranted … probably ever. “Stupid” had the same charge and was banished from my vocabulary. (As a teenager, I also was told not to use the word “suck” as an …
At a recent stop on his book tour for Shade, Pete Souza provided the following list of qualities one might look for in a presidential candidate. Obviously, his time spent with Barack Obama influenced this list, as does the contrast between Obama and Donald Trump. I agree with what Souza values in compiling this list, although …
On this cloudy Friday, I believe a few things to be true: I believe Christine Blasey Ford. I believe Brett Kavanaugh is a basically good man. Notwithstanding his behavior as a teenager and his petulant performance yesterday, which reeked of entitlement. I also believe Kavanaugh doesn’t remember what Blasey Ford accuses him of doing because …
Until I came across the word tournesol in a novel I was reading on my Kindle app the other day, the memory of the word — and the context in which I learned it — was distant and fuzzy in my memory, happily relegated to a zone of neurons I might well never have happened upon …
Background: Last week, I gave a short introduction to Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy for a group of new honors students at Chattanooga State (where I teach), and the remarks I gave really hit their mark uncommonly well. So, I thought I’d share. Although I don’t talk from a script, I captured my remarks soon after they …
There’s this part of my life, this whole era of my adult experience, that lies just outside my day-to-day view. And because it’s just outside my view, it’s really easy for me to forget about those years. When something happens that calls those days to mind, the experience of remembering feels out-of-body, like I’m watching an …
