Neither Here nor There

Every passage is thus, a place unto itself, a thing that connects, but is also disconnected. Each moment is its own molecule, each transition its own ellipsis...

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The Purposes of Post-Secondary Education

In my previous blog post on systems of stress I traversed a fair amount of my professional and personal experiences from 2017. I also got into some contentious political topics, especially in relation to higher ed. A casual read of that post might lead you to conclude that I have a fairly narrow belief about the purpose of post-secondary education, and that I’m dismissive of vocational outcomes in higher ed. Nothing could be further from the truth. This post aims to provide a bit of clarification, because this is in truth a complicated topic.

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Systems of Stress

This is a post about individuals and conflict behaviors, but more than that it’s about systems and how they elicit those behaviors. This post gets pretty personal at times, but the intent is not to air my or anyone else’s dirty laundry. The aim instead is to draw on experiences during an extremely difficult time in my life that also became entwined with professional failure, but to look beyond those individual stresses and failures at the bigger picture, and to say something (hopefully useful) about how individuals respond to pressures well outside of their control. Caveat emptor, this post is also very long.

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On Beating Dark Souls

I finally completed Dark Souls in 2018. It only took me 4 years and 38 days, but I did finally complete it and come to think of it, I have some things to say. Spoilers will follow.

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Try, Try Again

We don’t like to talk about failure much. It’s understandable really. Failure is kind of a downer as topics go, and at least in America we’re fundamentally obsessed with success and improvement as the underlying themes of life and society. We’re a pretty unbalanced culture if you look at it from say a more Taoist slant where you need to embrace an understanding of darkness (and know its value) to stand in the light and appreciate what it has to offer. In America we love to celebrate success, but we don’t even like to acknowledge failure. Even the Silicon Valley mantra of “fail fast” isn’t so much an embrace of real failure as a way to reassure the investor class that the gambles they make will pay off eventually in the next start-up.

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