Lasitas

Foreword I’m wrestling with traditions. Rituals. Marking the time as it goes by with more than the weekday-weekend split, more than simply naming the days by their slot in the seven-day cycle and their appointed month and number. For years, I had church and family traditions to give shape and meaning to the seasons. Candlelight services on Christmas Eve, family lunches at my mother’s family’s houses on Thanksgiving and Christmas, Lenten sacrifices, Easter sunrise services. Those have all fallen away with time and geographic distance. Alex’s and my family have scattered across the country from Alaskan islands to South Carolina pinelands, from hip college towns in California to forested suburbs in Missouri, and even the 100 miles between Philadelphia and Baltimore is increasingly a distance I am reluctant to cross. How to commit any given holiday to one part of the clan or the other? Each holiday we spend with my father is a time zone away from a holiday we could spend with Alex’s fa...

There's a question that I've been pondering lately: Why do people like seeing their favorite characters suffer? As many of you know, I love Final Fantasy VII. In particular, I love Cloud Strife, the moody sad boy protagonist of the game. Because of my great affection for this fictional man, I seek out (and write) fanfiction where Cloud faces a variety of hardships from childhood trauma to harrowing battle injuries to horrific laboratory experimentation to plain just being lonely. But why? Why do I like reading about a character that means a lot to me, who reminds me a lot of myself in some ways and has helped me understand myself better, suffering? Why do I seek out stories where he is in pain? And why am I not alone? There is an entire genre of fanfiction called “whump” where the writer’s favorite character is subjected to whatever sadistic imaginings the author can dream up. And people can dream up a lot of pain for Cloud Strife, largely because that’s sort of his deal in th...

 Hello all! Remember when I started this blog and I claimed that part of its purpose was to post my creative writing projects? If you've been dutifully scrolling through pictures of Hazel waiting for the real show to begin, today's your day. I've decided to start by posting some old writing from my Google Drive Creative Writing folder. Part of what I found exciting about starting my own blog was the prospect of finally having a place to publish my writing because it's something I've dabbled in for almost my entire life but rarely had a meaningful audience for, which has at times been disheartening. Today's entry in the archives is from November 10, 2018. It was the founding document of my Creative Writing folder in Google Drive, which, up to that point, had only really been a place where I saved work documents. I considered not posting this one because it was more of a warm-up, I thought, than an actual piece of creative writing, but rereading it, I think it...

  Today some former students contacted me, telling me they had just completed the AP Latin exam. They wanted to thank me for the role I played in getting them to that point. It was touching to see that, even though I bailed on that career choice after only two and a half years, I had still made a lasting impact in the lives of some great kids. That got me feeling introspective about my decision to leave teaching in December 2019 and about the life I’ve led since. It had me wishing I could make a speech to that graduating class of Latin students, an opportunity I gave up when leaving halfway through their junior year. I realized I could still write it out, and, hey, maybe some of them will read this after all. Salvete, discipulae carissimae, Don’t worry, the rest of this is Anglice. When we met in August 2017, it was your first day of high school. It was my first day of having a job. This may come as a surprise because I made efforts to seem like I was an old hand in the classroom. ...

  Hello, devoted reader (or hopefully, readers). Many of you are likely reading this blog because I have announced that I will be leaving Facebook and encouraged you to read this instead of my Facebook posts. But why am I doing any of this? Won’t it be harder to communicate with people without Facebook? Isn’t it inconvenient for people to have to go to a separate website to look at pictures of Hazel? And now I’m expecting people to read ? Why this sudden sadism? Well, I’ve been thinking. And when I start thinking, I usually think a lot, so get comfy. I’ve been thinking about accountability, and power, and ethics, and the role I play in the world being what it is. I’ve been thinking about how much of our lives are shaped by choices that we know little to nothing about. I spend a lot of time wondering about the behind-the-scenes of my choices. How does my diet affect the planet? Is streaming music ethical? What actually happens to what I put in the recycling bin? How can Facebook be ...