“You could not see my face because I was just covered in boxes” I'm not sure what's the heaviest thing I've ever carried, but probably that's got to be my dog when I was a child. I used to have a Bernese mountain dog, and I'm pretty sure she would weigh the same as me. I was, I don't know how much, but I was probably 12 years old when we got her. She was huge and she was really loving, so I would always carry her. But I love carrying things because it made me feel really strong. Like whenever I go to the grocery store, I always get a lot of food, and then I always get it from the car in one, in one go, like I never come back. One time actually, I got a bunch of Amazon packages when I moved to my apartment, so I had to get a lot of furniture for cheap. So I got it from Amazon and actually all the packages came at the same time and sometimes they bring them right to the second floor where I stay, um, but when I ordered the heaviest stuff, they left it on the ground floor by the mail room. So I had to carry all probably eight boxes by myself to the second floor, which was actually probably the third because the ground floor doesn't count. And I could have came back for the -- half of the packages, but I ended up carrying all of them stacked on top of each other, and I actually felt like a cartoon character because it's a very common scene when somebody's carrying too many things on top of each other and it gets -- like, you could not see my face because I was just covered in boxes, and I was dropping them on the way to the third floor, but I was just so committed to do it in one go. I'm not sure why I'd rather do that than come back, maybe -- yeah, I don't know how it's easier. But that's, that was really heavy, I remember. So maybe yeah, the heaviest thing I've ever carried would be my dog and the eight Amazon packages.

“It wasn't a real hug, but it was something phenomenal.” I was trying to think of the last time I felt genuinely happy and that was on February 15th 2024, because on that day, I got a massive hug of encouragement. It wasn't a real hug, but it was something phenomenal that gripped my heart and kept me moving throughout the semester. I really did love that day so much. Um, I was having a very difficult time writing this paper for my LGBTQ+ studies course. And that was -- the, the, the topic of the paper was to find a couple artifacts, dig through them, get everything out of them, find the codes, find the true meaning, find everything, find all the interpretations, and tie it up with class topics and submit. But I was having a horrible time because I just had no confidence in my ability to write. I -- there's nothing worse than looking at something that you did and saying, “Wow, this is awful.” And that's how I felt on that day, so. But before I get into that I want to talk about the artifacts that I chose and that -- er, those were zines. They were “blue floral gusset” and “Travesty #2” by, uh, Spurzine, who's an Australian zinester. And the thing I love so much about zines is the completely unfiltered nature of the, of the zine. It's so phenomenal. It's a window into the mind. It's true passion, and that's what I can sniff out. That's what I love to see. I love to see true passion radiating off of my computer monitor or holding it in the palm of my hand. It just feels powerful. I was researching these zines and I felt awful about ‘em because I didn't have any confidence in myself. But I went to the writing center. I went to the writing center at my university. I sat down with somebody. They were a sounding board for the, for the ideas that I was creating in my mind. And at the end of the session, they looked at me in the eyes after listening to me ramble on and on and on for like an hour and a half, and they say, "Don't undersell yourself. You're a phenomenal writer. All of the things that you said made sense." And I like stood up from my chair,…

"I'm sitting here in my dorm, everything's absolutely in shambles" So, I am completing my first year as an undergraduate student, and it's been quite the journey, just getting here and all so, um, like completing the year itself, but specifically I'm packing up my dorm. I'm like pack- -- I'm packing everything up, and I don't consider myself to be quite a collector. If you were to ask me outright, I would say that I'm quite minimal, but after seeing everything that I have accumulated this year, I have to come with the -- I have to grasp the fact that I may be a tad bit of a collector. Um, my friends and I, we tend to frequent the crafting events on campus, and so there's usually extras, so I take like things like collages or like jewelry making supplies and I put this all into like ottomans in my dorm. And now that I'm going through the ottomans, I'm realizing I may have a tad bit of a problem with crafting, and I'm not sure how I'm going to get all home.So I'm sitting here in my dorm, everything's absolutely in shambles, and I'm going through this like, it's um, it's quite a curation of artifacts. But yeah, everything everything's in such a disarray, believe it or not. I'm supposed to be out by tomorrow, my mother is coming to collect me. And yeah, I highly doubt everything's going to fit into our car. And as a side note, I've hung up quite a bit of posters, and some of them have ripped off the paint off the wall, and I'm not trying to catch a charge, so what I've done is, because they've repainted over these walls so many times the paint kind of comes off in these like layered chunks. So they're very pliable. It's like a piece of paper. And so I have taken some of these crafting supplies that I've collected over my over the year, and I have begun gluing them back onto the wall. Um, because I don't know what else to do.So, I started taking off these like little pieces that have come off the wall, and then you know what, I'm going with my Elmer's glue stick, and I'm just sticking them back on and they're actually staying, so I'm going to consider that a win. I'm going to…

"It was a very serious gash in my leg" When I was 13, I had a scimitar-esque sword that I would play with because I was super into anime and action movies for the main character would be fighting off hordes of enemies with just his trusty blade, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever. So I would play with that thing in my room late at night, and unsurprisingly, one of the nights I was playing with it, I got myself quite badly because it was a sharp and pointy blade. So, when I did end up getting myself, it was because I pulled off that action movie move where the main character stabs somebody behind him because he's just so in the zone that he can like sense their presence. I got myself in the hip, and I couldn't feel it. I think my body went into like a protective shock right away, but I knew that I had done it. So I rushed into the bathroom and right when I saw how bad it was, I started panicking because it was about two inches in diameter and like half an inch deep, so it was a very serious gash in my leg. And my family had like first aid kits in all the bathrooms, so I wrapped myself up really good, really tight and left the bathroom a big mess. And I just went to bed after that. I was still in middle school. I still had chores to do. So I would be moving around with it. And I never told an adult about this until years later when I was sure that I wouldn't be punished or scolded for my embarrassing actions because I was just so embarrassed. But it was a very like deathly wound. At a time about a month in, I unwrapped it to see how it was doing. It was doing poorly. It was healing, but it was gross looking, like it looked like something that a doctor needed to see and even then, I just wasn't going to tell anyone. My body did eventually just heal it all the way up. The scar is very strange; it looks kind of like a potato. But I didn't die, which is surprising. The more I explain the story to people, the more people tell me that I was probably just…

"She was in the room with the bird as it flew out of the fireplace" I'm in the process of selling the home that my late wife and I bought when we moved to Lexington, Kentucky. So, the -- one consistent issue that the home has had is certain parts of the roof and siding and gutters have not always been the most impervious to intrusion. So, repeatedly, we have had birds get into two different parts of the home. Most consistently, they've gone into the attic, originally through the eaves and then more recently through some of the side of the gutters. But, what happened more often -- or the problem that arised earlier which I'm actually kind of grateful for, was for a little while, in 2021, 2022, birds were getting in through the chimney of the house which then -- which had a cap, but there was a large space at the top of the chimney between the opening and the cap, large enough that birds could pretty easily fall in. And then the trick was they couldn't really get out. So we first discovered this when we came back from visiting family over Christmas 2021, 2022. We got into the house and found that a bunch of things were knocked down. There was bird poop everywhere, unfortunately, and there was a dead bird. So basically, over the next few months, I dragged my feet and I did not, did not take the necessary steps to getting the chimney properly screened in to prevent birds from getting into it. So sometime in Spring of 2022, I was working on campus in the writing center, which is how I got funding that first year and I -- Jaci, my late wife, tried to call me and of course I couldn't receive the call because I was in the basement. So I only found out about it after the fact. But she called and left a voicemail because another bird had dropped into the chimney. And so the voicemail was actually -- she took it while the bird -- while she was in the room with the bird as it flew out of the fireplace, knocked a lattice off our window, the lattice came crashing down, partially cracked. The panic in her voice was pretty obvious, but also a note of sort of manic humor, and she basically told…

I was blocking the whole lane. There were like six cars behind me. I had a less-than-successful driving situation. It has to do with the Michigan lefts. So what I didn't realize is, um, you're not allowed to turn left. You have to go straight and then do a kind of U-turn to get to where you're going, and these intersections do have a sign. They are kind of clearly marked, I guess. But, the intersection in particular I'm thinking of, all of the, the signs, like the lights and that no left turn sign, they're just sort of dangling on a wire. I don't know, it's hard to tell what lane the sign applies to. So there's this intersection that's no left turns. I've been turning left. There haven't been very many cars. I've been getting away with it. It's been fine. Um, except, about a, a week ago. There were a lot of cars, it was very busy, and I went to turn left, like I normally do. And I realized at the last second, like, "Hey, there are way too many cars, I should probably go straight here. Wait, no, I can turn here, I always turn here. Wait, no, I can't turn here." And so this thought process was happening back and forth, while, you know, there are cars everywhere, I'm actively driving. I was just at a dead stop at this intersection. I was blocking the whole lane, there were like six cars behind me, and people were honking at me. I knew I was completely in the wrong, I could feel my face turning red, I could feel my ears turning, like, hot, turning red. And there was this guy who really -- he stuck his whole torso out of his window just so that he could use his arms to make rude gestures and just communicate that he didn't like my driving. Um, which, you know, fair. I was, I was completely in the wrong. Well, apparently no cops saw me, which is great. No traffic tickets. I haven't had any Michigan traffic tickets. Um, I got through the intersection just fine.

"But one thing I am grateful for is the connections that we do make." This week, I moved across the country and I'm away from all of my family and friends that I had built up. Um, and it's an exciting change. I'm excited for everything that I am going to do. But it has been difficult adjusting to a different culture and a different place. But one thing I am grateful for is the connections that we do make, and those chance encounters that we sometimes have. I was at a gathering of young adults, uh, for part of my church and, while I was there, I walked in not expecting to know anybody. I looked around the room and I wasn't very excited, uh, to talk to anyone, to get to meet new people, but I looked around and, uh, as I was scanning, I saw someone from the area that I had just moved from and I was super excited, so I called out to her. I said, "Hey!" and she turned, looked at me, kind of not really expecting it to be me. When she finally recognized who I was, her eyes just lit up. And seeing her eyes light up just really made me grateful that we had made that connection earlier. It made that evening go so much smoother than I had planned, and it made moving here and adjusting a lot easier.

"I am really excited to look back on these in a few years and see what my mind was going through the moment, I suppose." I am a person who has very weird dreams. Although I guess by definition, dreams are pretty weird already. Like, once I dreamed that a giant pigeon was chasing my tour group through the ruins of Ancient Rome. And the main reason we were concerned about the giant pigeon chasing us was because we were afraid it would poop on our heads. So that was an exciting dream. I'm happy to inform you that I eventually did escape the pigeon. And another time, oh! Another time, I was an alchemist peering through a telescope - no not a telescope - a scope that lets you see far, but not like into space - at a fascinating phenomenon of alchemy that I could see happening in like the ocean below the cliff that I was on. And this alchemy transformation was a bubble amongst the waves and this little boy - and the bubble was turning into a boy, and the boy was turning into a bubble. And I was just absolutely fascinated by this. And this is kind of embarrassing but when I was in middle school, I used to dream a lot about anime characters. Looking through my dream journal, I was just so surprised at how frequently in my dreams this or that anime character would appear and just do completely random things. I mean, I'm in college now and I guess it hasn't changed because sometimes I still dream about novel characters. I have been getting more into journaling my dreams recently. I very first started journaling about my dreams in elementary school, but I didn't really do it that frequently. I would maybe do, you know, one dream journal entry every few months or something like that. And I didn't remember my dreams that often, although I think I remember them more often than most people do. But recently, I've been basically journaling about my dreams every day, or at least trying to. And it's really interesting to see all the different variety of things that my brain comes up with like, day-to-day. I am really excited to look back on these in a few years and see what my mind was going through the moment, I suppose.

"...a good line to describe sort of my perspective, which is that the places that you go shape who you are and the way that you see the world." So two years ago I was in my senior year of high school and it was I think around January-ish that everybody in the senior class got an email saying, "We're going to do senior quotes for the yearbook. If you want to do a senior quote, you can send us-" I think it was -- you had to give two dollars to the English teacher or something who was in charge of running the yearbook- "and then you can pick a quote, and we'll put it in the yearbook." And so I was super excited because I have wanted to do a senior quote since I was in -- started high school. But I realized I hadn't really thought about what I wanted my quote to be and so I thought, "I want to do something from a poem," because I really like poetry. And I eventually managed to get it down to two options- so this is after I had paid the two dollars and everything- and one of them was from a Percy Bysshe Shelley poem called Ozymandias. And the line is, "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and Despair!" and I thought you know, that would be kind of funny to do because within the poem it's a line that's the inscription on a statue that has been destroyed by time, and so, you know, it's sort of about how nothing, you know, lasts forever, even great power is gone, and so I thought it'd be kind of, like, funny and ironic because it's like- it's this super high and mighty line about something that is no longer high and mighty, but eventually I decided, you know, maybe that could be taken the wrong way. And so I decided to go with a line from a Sylvia Plath poem and the line is, I think, "And what if the sky here is no different/ And it is my eyes that have sharpened themselves?" And so the reason that I chose that was because I thought, you know, I, I've moved around in my life and I've learned to call different places home. And so, you know, I thought that it was sort of a good line to…

"My heart was beating outta my throat and I, like, looked behind me." Have you ever had a strange or paranormal experience and what happened? And as embarrassed as I am to say, I think that yes, during middle school, I had one of these strange or paranormal experiences. Um, but in middle school, I, uh, was living -- like my bedroom was in the basement and our basement was set up in this u-shape. Um, so the middle of the U was where the stairs would be coming from the main level down to the basement and then on either side of like the long legs of the U was my bedroom and then my brother's bedroom. So like we shared a wall but you would have to walk all the way around the U for me to get to my brother's bedroom. And it was a fairly long basement, cause it was a ranch style house and so the basement, um, was really long and kind of narrow. And my mom had set up these mirrors down there to make it seem even, like, longer, I guess, I dunno. But they would be on either side of the entrance to the stairs such that if you like stood in front of the mirror, you could see all the way down the leg and then back into whichever bedroom, either mine or my brothers. And they were really nice mirror with like good lighting above it. And so that's usually where I would do my hair in the morning. And so I would be sitting in front of the mirror braiding my hair like Katniss Everdeen, like an -- into a side ponytail kinda situation. Um, and then I could see all the way behind me to my bedroom. And then there were two other doorways on my side of the basement that my brother didn't have. There was a door to a bathroom and right across the door was it -- er, yeah, right across from the bathroom, there was a door to under the stairs. And we -- when we moved in had never been able to get into that room. And we just couldn't get it open and it didn't really seem important to open it, so we never really tried. Um, but during the mornings when I was braiding my hair, I would sit in…