[5 minute read] (CW: pet death) For a year, two of my colleagues shared an office across from mine. They were best friends, and they stocked their space with craft beer and a reclaimed yellow armchair, squishy and velveteen, and spent their office hours in conversation together. Maybe it was because my own best friend lived abroad and my office lunches were pretty lonely, but this scene...
[5 minute read] Last month, when teaching a Metathesis post I previously wrote about being a Catholic scholar, I felt like a bit of a fraud. My intention in using this post was to give my students a look at my research on a rare book they had examined for class. However, when one of my students immediately remarked that the book smelled “you know, like when you’re at Easter Mass, and the priest...
My room has always been a mess. Today, when I say “mess,” I mean I have a couple piles of books and some empty spaces on a shelf—or, I have a shelf completely filled and an overflow collected on my bedroom floor. There are stacks of papers on my bookshelf, on my nightstand, on my desk, on the printer on my desk… I know what they all say (or at least I did at one point). At the end of the...
I’m driving a two-door 2001 gold grand am. The air conditioning no longer works after the transmission broke, wooden clothes pins and duct tape secure the windows. It must be August because I’m heading towards the city public library to flip through stacks of CD cases for a Canadian indie pop album. Is a locality with less than 10,000 residents a city? A town, maybe. We had spent the summer in...
I’m at a local beer place. They have three dozen beers on draft and a menu that consists of roast beef, roast turkey, pickled eggs, and maybe sometimes beef stew. I am tired, I am breaking my alcohol fast, and I am trying to revise a shitty document into something less shitty so that when I meet with my adviser tomorrow I can look him in the eye without this defensive lump in my throat. There’s a...
Note: When I agreed to write for Metathesis this month I planned on starting off with something strident, political, and sharp. I had this series all planned out about football and fascism, “third way” pro-lifers, and Stardew Valley in the age of Trump. Maybe I’ll revisit these before months’ end, but I did not count on how tired I would feel by the first few weeks of our new regime, nor how...