b.rox

I drew these candles and asked Persephone to color them red with yellow flames. She understood my instructions perfectly, but it seems she has a mind of her own. Happy Candlemas!

Here I am on my 20th birthday, with my mother and sister. My hair was thicker then. That was 25 years ago today. For as long as I can remember, I’ve contemplated my mortality on an almost daily basis, yet I’ve often behaved as if I think I’m immortal. I’ve frequently envisioned myself as an [...]

Dear Persephone, It’s the holiday season. But and also (to paraphrase David Foster Wallace) you are 46 months old today. On this night, the longest night of the year, you are fully expecting Santa to pay us a visit. Santa is tricky for me, as a parent. He reveals certain weaknesses in my ontology. How [...]

Dear Persephone, You are forty-five months old today. It seems like you’ve packed a lot of living into the last month. Especially around the holiday: We had fun making simple skull garlands out of paper and decorating the house. You had a blast on your first real round of trick-or-treating. (Afterward you wanted to wait [...]

On November 11, 2011, eleven of us gathered at The 1111 Building, in parking space #11, and at precisely eleven minutes and eleven seconds after eleven o’clock a.m., we raised a toast — the No. 11 Cup. That’s eleven elevens, in case you weren’t keeping track.

A bit discombobulated and disconnected for this recent holiday. Perhaps that’s because I was traveling just before — the POD Network traditionally has their conference at the end of October, and this one was combined with the annual conference of the HBCU Faculty Development Network, and we mustered our biggest contingent (four) ever. Wouldn’t have [...]

Dear Persephone, You are forty-four months old today. I am forty-four years old. I guess that means I’m roughly twelve times as old as you. Your big dramatic moment of the last month came when you locked yourself in the bathroom. It was on a Saturday morning. You went into the bathroom, insisting that you [...]

Equinox It’s a precise moment that happens twice a year, when the equatorial plane of the earth intersects the center of the sun. That’s the equinox. This year it came at 4:04 AM (local time) on the morning of Friday, September 23rd. For this moment only, the earth’s axis was not tilted one way or [...]

Dear Persephone, You are forty-three months old today. You’ve just completed your first full month of school. Every day you are coming home full of songs and dances, art and ideas. You learned a new favorite phrase there too: “Everyone makes mistakes; that’s how they learn.” I had to point out that your mother learns [...]

Yes, a month after the fact I’m still recovering from Tales of the Cocktail. Here’s my fourth and final installment. I learned some fascinating stuff from Jeff “Beachbum” Berry. For example, I didn’t know that the legendary founder of the Tiki Craze, Don the Beachcomber, came from New Orleans. (Wikipedia says otherwise but I have [...]

I’d heard there was a marsh fire out east, but we didn’t smell anything until Monday morning. By the time I left for work, I was surprised to see the streets of Mid-City were shrouded in gray smokey haze. It was bad enough that I wore a bandana over my face as I rode to [...]

Over the past year or two I’ve become increasingly interested in the idea of contemplative pedagogy. This is the notion that we can foster a more thoughtful way of living and learning in our students and in ourselves by cultivating reflective and meditative practices in our teaching. To this end, I’ve relished the opportunity to [...]

Today was Persephone’s first day of school ever. She’s going to a small Catholic school on the West Bank of Jefferson Parish. I never thought I’d be sending my daughter there, but it’s the same school where Xy teaches, so the convenience is unbeatable. There are precious few publicly-funded pre-K3 programs in town. We don’t [...]

My main way of getting to work over the past decade has been on a bicycle; much of my ride has been on the Jeff Davis bike path. It’s so much less stressful to me than driving a car, and I am so glad I don’t have to start my day in an automobile. Nevertheless, [...]

Probably my favorite thing about having a media credential for Tales of the Cocktail is breakfast. And of course lunch, but a good breakfast is essential. There’s a super-secret room where presenters, media and VIPs get to tie on the feedbag. Each meal has a different sponsor, usually a distiller. Cocktails are served, of course, [...]

It’s become a tradition to take a photo of Xy as she heads off to her first day of classes. I realized this morning that we’ve been doing this for long enough that I have built up quite a little archive, going back to 2005, just a few days before Katrina. These photos kind of [...]

Twenty-five years ago — I came home from Sweden with blue hair, much to my parents’ shock and my sister’s delight. At least I think she was delighted. Kind of hard to tell in this photo. Certainly I was glad to be back home. It was a great experience, my year abroad, but it was [...]

One of my core values is the idea of respecting others. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But like many deeply cherished values, it tends to get a bit complicated under intense scrutiny. In fact I have often considered myself a misanthrope, which might seem to be at odds with respecting others. It’s easy for me to [...]

Tales of the Cocktail ended last week, but it’s taken me this long to sort through all my photos and videos and notes. When I tell people about Tales of the Cocktail, they either get it right away or seem puzzled by the whole thing. To some, the idea of a conference on the subject [...]