Conversation Starters

 "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  When the student is really ready, the teacher will disappear." - Tao Te Ching For over 11 years, I had an almost daily yoga practice. It started in February 2008 when a housemate and dear friend of mine all but forced me to join her for a class.  She'd selected the studio and told me what time to be ready and because I'm a good wingman, I went along with it -- just for her.  I am  certain  I told the desk staff that I would never return. Famous last words. Not only did I return a week later, I returned the week after that and the week after that until I found a teacher or two I really enjoyed and the next thing you know, I was hooked. Before long, I was enrolled in a monthly membership and prioritizing time on my mat over afterwork drinks. Sometimes I'd compromise and go to class  and then  show up to drinks, normalizing the "wear your yoga gear in public" long before it became the now-standar...

It is doing that March-weather thing outside today: big, fat snowflakes that dissolve as soon as they hit the pavement.  I gotta admit: there's something sort of joy-inducing about the beauty of these fluffy white blobs descending from the heavens while knowing full well nary a shovel will need to be employed.  Certainly, we're nowhere near the point where we're ready to bust out the beach balls and the swimsuits but we're creeping ever closer to the in-between where those kinds of daydreams drift closer to upcoming reality. Spring in Ohio, folks.  This is it. I enjoyed this day from the comfort of my work-from-home setup, a glorious space that I have grown to adore.  It's this funny flip of the script in my life, this capacity to be able to do my job in the same place where I live.  For so much of my adult life, I lived in apartments with one to three other people (and their cats -- their many, many cats) and the thought of  work from home  not only s...

As you may know, I'm a fan of the podcast   Ghost of a Podcast .  This weekly show is hosted by the psychic/medium/astrologer Jessica Lanyadoo where she answers a listener question and then gets into the astrological forecast for the week ahead.  Sometimes I skip over the listener questions because her answers are so specific to this one person's chart and while that can be interesting, it's not always the sort of voyeurism I'm into on any given day. This week, though, the listener wrote about her own psychic abilities and how she'd followed them in pursuit of finding her own life partner.  Now, I'm not super-expert on this, but what I know about psychics and mediums is they often can't "read" themselves -- so I'm going to chock this up to the listener's own intense gut-instinct and intuition, which is what most psychic ability derives from.  Anyway, this listener said she asked the Universe to bring her a soulmate and it did -- but what sh...

It's become a regular occurrence when I'm out walking through Lakeview Cemetery for folks to stop me and ask how to get to a famous gravesite.  "Excuse me," someone will say as they roll down their car window.  "Do you know where Rockefeller is?"  I pause and orient myself because, yes, I know where John D. Rockefeller's grave is -- I just need a moment to think on that in relation to wherever we might be in the 285 acres that is the cemetery grounds.  Then I give them directions and send them on their way.  And I chuckle -- because what made them think I'd know?   Over twenty years of customer service radiates from me.  Lakeview isn't the first place I've had strangers approach me for information that there's no reasonable reason I should have.  I've had old women come up to white-blonde-lady-me in a grocery store speaking only Spanish.  I've had people next to me in a coffee shop ask my opinion on Kindle versus Nook.  I've ...

  Reflection on the Simulation of Working With Parents of Elementary School-Aged Children  Returning to In-Person Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic Identifying the Community  For my video simulation, my selected community is parents of elementary school-aged children in a district that is reopening to in-person classes. I selected this group because I have school-aged nephews as well as a number of friends who work in schools, and so I have seen all sides of this conversation around safety for students and staff amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on this group of parents also provides an opportunity for me to explore a multi-faceted and dynamic array of viewpoints and concerns. While some parents have worked from home during the pandemic, others haven’t had that as an option, while still others lost or given up their jobs in order to be home with their kids.  Additionally, different families had different assessments of safety during the pandemic, ...

 Written April 15, 2021 Community Safety Belongs to All of Us As I write, the trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds.  This Minnesota police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man whose only crime was paying for some items at a convenience store with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill.  For this nonviolent offense, Mr. Floyd was pinned to the ground with Officer Chauvin’s knee on his neck.  Video footage of the nine minutes and thirty seconds that proved to be Mr. Floyd’s final moments captured him struggling for air and gasping the words, “I can’t breathe.”  Even so, this officer of the law remained unmoved and Mr. Floyd died (Chappell, 2021).  The video itself became a tragic viral phenomenon capturing the cruel final moments of Mr. Floyd’s life.   The harsh and heartbreaking reality is that stories like this are only too common in the United States.  As “Policing in America,” a recent episode of the NPR podcast Throughline , thoroughly expl...

Policy Overview Policing in the United States has a long, often troubling, history (Anderson, 2016).  With law enforcement being tasked with the bulk of what is broadly defined as “public safety,” officers are said to “protect and serve” the public-at-large.  The harsh reality, though, is that Black and Brown people are targeted more often by the police, resulting in generations of community trauma and escalating violence between the two “sides” (Sakala and La Vigne, 2019). What’s true, too, is that these public safety trustees are called to serve functions that go outside of typical police officer training or common expectation of their duties (Vermeer et al, 2020).  This combination of implicit (or explicit) racial biases/tensions and the undue stress of calling the police for matters that they are not equipped or needed to handle has resulted in unnecessary violence and death, both of residents and sworn officers (Kahn, 2018).  In 2020, the murder-by-police of Geo...