Oberlin Blogs

Inside, podcasts of A Prairie Home Companion ushered Keepers and visitors into the dining room where we filled our plates and other eating receptacles with hamburger noodle hotdish, green bean casserole, wild rice, powdermilk biscuits, and jello with Swedish fish before heading outside to the sunshine.

I love warm weather. Everything feels better when you can walk out the front door and realize you're wearing too many layers.

Papageno, essentially a humanized bird and bird catcher, sang about how he wanted to catch chicks. And when he said "chicks," he didn't mean those little yellow baby chickens.

Several weeks ago, I found myself on a top floor balcony suite at a ski resort 300 miles away, talking and sharing laughs with a couple of the freshest talents out of Cleveland. How did I wind up there?

In this post: Mad Max , our inevitable doom, The Communist Manifesto , superempirical virtues in theory choice, Stanley Fish, those problematic humanities, and a way-too-long post.

For three weeks of the year, the walls of the Bent corridor (which I totally thought was just a descriptor, not the name of two illustrious alumni, up until last week) are graced with beautiful local artwork from students from the 9th Congressional District. I was ever so lucky to be there photographing it.

The challenge over the month came in donning both roles--as both a teacher and a student--all while being reassured along the way that we were likely to catch dengue fever, get taken hostage at a Jakarta airport, and be heaved out of a moving train on our way to Moscow.

I am still here. Though I entered Oberlin with an expected graduation date of May 2016, my taking a semester off has delayed that until this upcoming semester. This reality took me a long time to accept and I have a lot of feelings about what "not graduating on time" means for me.

In fear of the real world, I resolved to do and see as many ridiculous things as I can this semester. Like swing dancing.

There were, of course, pages of specific instructions and a symbol key, but that doesn't change the fact that for my friend's recital I was required to look at a photo of a rabbit man in a suit running away from artillery fire and translate it into a part for drum set/percussion.

I'm not even a huge history buff, but there's something stirring to the soul about stumbling across an old, crumbling stone and barely being able to make out the engraved letters: Born a slave, died free.

Some people speak Spanish, French, Chinese. My friends speak Science. If I didn't speak at least some pidgin Science, I couldn't understand them at all.