Lately this blog has been venturing into SRSBSNS territory. We are now in the second half of the semester and the real work on the research papers gets started and the questions about WHAT COMES NEXT will also start tugging at our heels and my life will spiral into a mess of #gradschoolproblems. All of […]
I am experiencing an academic crisis of conscience. If you are here because you appreciate my stories about falling on my ass or my inability to learn French, this post will disappoint. GET OUT NOW! A few months ago I wrote a long rambly post about how I wanted to be able to help others […]
Somewhere in the sea of the thousand things that have happened in the last two weeks, I decided to participate in a vlog ring. I also changed the colors on this blog about a dozen times, and while I think this iteration is my favorite, I will still probably change it a few more times. […]
Last week 20sb announced the nominees for this year’s Bootleg awards and I came home to some awesome emails and @replies because (1) Childhood Trauma was unopposed for Best Group Blog (!!!) and (2) I was personally nominated for a few things. Taking a look at the full list, I was a little bit excited. […]
It isn’t really the holiday season until the Sweeney family piles into the car with a bunch of suitcases, a few canvases, and some gigantic frames for a minimum of six hours. My little sister is about to be seventeen, and we are not exactly a tiny family, so we get some real quality bonding […]
Of all the shit I have purchased since my arrival in Paris, the €20 coffee maker was probably the best. (In perhaps a bit of a contradiction, I would say that splurging on a nice duvet was probably the second best purchase.) I have very little to report on life in Paris because I spend […]
My phone rings and I know it’s my mom — she’s the only one who has my landline number, aside from the automated French recording that calls every so often. “Derrik was arrested in Cairo.” I didn’t know how to respond to that information. It was a short phone call — she wanted to make sure that I heard […]
Last week was nothing short of insane. It was an emotional and informational roller coaster for my entire family. While I have lots to talk about on that front…that’s not what I’m going to do today. I will, soon, I promise, but not today. I want to talk about censorship and regulating the internet, and […]
I could not have asked for a better send-off from the US. I leave for France in three days and in addition to the flurry of excitement surrounding my departure prep, I am still reeling from how fantastic my weekend was. In my year of basement-dwelling, teaching, and becoming a gym rat, I have never […]
I keep changing my tagline because I still don’t know what I’m doing with this blog and because I like to pretend that anyone other than me might actually care. Also on the list of bloggy-things-that-only-I-care-about, I redesigned the page now that I have this supremely amazing-but-not-really new tagline that I will change nineteen times […]