I take a lot of things in my life very seriously and one of them is Secret Santa. Sure, currently on the corner of my desk sits a pile of essays about 1960s-style film antiheroes that I should probably grade and there are definitely recommendation letters I need to write so some of my students can get into good colleges and not eventually have to live on the street or get a job at SUR. I should also possibly carve out the time to call the parent of an eighteen year old in one of my classes who sits directly in my eye-line and picks his nose and then eats it. (This is something that really happens. The first time I saw it, I was quite certain that I was hallucinating. I was not hallucinating; the dive into the kid’s nose was real and it was not just a one-time thing. This event happens daily and I fear I might never be the same again. Also, should this kid’s final average turn out to be … Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about empathy, both as a broad concept and how it manifests specifically in my own life. Empathy comes easily to me (in much the way patience does not) and I’ve always been drawn to the empathetic sort, the kind of person who sweats great big drops of empathy after an intense workout that includes one-armed emotional pushups. See, I think that the tendency to comprehend someone else’s feelings and then adopt those same emotions as a way to connect on a deeper level is, in many ways, just an offshoot of being logical. Think about it: someone you know feels hurt or lost and you can see pain written across her face like a story that doesn’t have an ending – or one filled with far too many endings – and you take a second to trace back what it is that might have caused her to currently be curled up in a trembling fetal position on your living room floor. You know enough about her to realize it’s … Continue reading →