The joy of seeing items reborn — I have been searching for treasure for as long as I can remember. In high school, I only wore vintage clothing because I was obsessed with 1960s fashion. Later, when I began graduate school, I quickly discovered Wasteland in Santa Monica — my dream store. Everything there was designer brand…

Since I first saw the ads on TV, I have wondered: “what is Meta?” The commercials show ordinary people putting on large glasses and working out in some sort of intense virtual reality. First and foremost, Meta is a company owned by Facebook which tries to bring the “metaverse” to…

If you are in the tech world, you have already likely heard of AWS (Amazon Web Services), the frontrunner to other cloud services such as Microsoft Azure. AWS is a secure cloud services platform which offers compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionalities that allow companies to build…

And I’m not sorry I did. — I completed my PhD program in the spring of 2011 — a little over a decade ago. I assumed that I would find a position as an Assistant Professor at some point in the not-so-distant future. My expectations were high, but they were not totally unrealistic given my status in…

Why College Education Will Never Be the Same Again — According to current data from Insidehighered.com, if you were to ask a decent number of randomly-chosen professors on any college campus whether they believe that in-person learning is superior to online learning, over half of them would say “yes.” If you asked me that same question, I would answer: “I’m…

A confession to my readers — The thoughts that I will share with you, my dear reader, may shock and upset you. They may cause you to dislike me. But I am willing to accept that risk because I need to to confess. Writing allows me to exit my own thoughts for a while. Judge me…

I asked him to break my heart — It seems odd to me that life is, in many ways, so predictable; that certain actions are almost never positive. It is never a good idea to dwell for too long on unrequited love, for example. Why? Because it is better for us to live in the real world, to…

A poem written by 15 year old me —

My brother’s oldie-but-goodie deserves a close reading — Storybookland Plastic castles six feet tall. The animatronic band playing music in the hall. Reality crept up oh so suddenly It was enough to startle me In the mirror house At the carnival. I took a photo from nowhere I tried to see from no perspective. I took two steps…