Tag Archives: online publications

News and publications from 2019, on to 2020

World Trade Center (Portland)"World Trade Center (Portland)" by donpdonp is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

It has been quite a year! Let’s take a look.

January: I rode into 2019 as a new mom and returned to full-time teaching.

Summer: Next City and Urban Land articles got me back into publishing my work, and I loved it. The editors (one I knew and the other I worked with for the first time) were great.

October: My son toddled – full throttle – into his first birthday.

Mid-December saw me madly grading more than 90 final papers and presentations. I submitted final grades on Monday! Phew!

Now here I am, watching the last days of December winking along my calendar into 2020. I look forward to closing the year with the lights of Hanukkah and D.C. As family members from four states and the District converge, we plan to hit both Zoolights and the light maze at Nationals Park, not to mention watch light sabers flash through Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Best wishes to you and yours this holiday season!

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If X Were Your Y

If X were your Y

For your reading list

If you’re prone to binge reading, close this tab right now.

Think you can handle it? Here it comes: Check out the Toast’s If X Were Your Y. This section caught my eye with If LaVar Burton and Yo-Yo Ma Were Your Dads by Nicole Chung and Karissa Chen. Then I read another piece. And another. You could say it’s my latest obsession.

The premise is as simple as one phrase: “If ___ were your ___.” Writers fill out that phrase, and then take it to its logical – and then far beyond logical – conclusions. With that Chung-Chen piece, the idea led to passages like:

If LeVar Burton and Yo-Yo Ma were your dads, when you were a kid, every time you had a question about anything (“How do you spell ‘loquacious’?” “Do sharks sleep with their eyes closed?”), LeVar Burton would tell you to take a look, it’s in a book. And when you complained about how annoying Dad was being, Yo-Yo Ma would play a slow, sad song on the cello, and they’d laugh at you (never unkindly) as you stomped away.

Logical enough. But did you know “if LeVar Burton and Yo-Yo Ma were your dads, your orchids would never die, no matter how much you overwatered them”? That one waves to logical as it passes, keeps going, and ends up three galaxies away. Another great one: If Justin Bieber Were My Terrible, Golden Son. Continue reading

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