Did You Dirty
I'm getting control of my Substack. Rather than emailing individual stories, I will go old-school and start sending a weekly newsletter. Hopefully, that will be less annoying.
Calamus Words #1
The View from the Ivory Precipice
On Wednesday, a student came up to me after class, mentioned that he had been in one of my classes last semester, and said “They kind of did you dirty.” That was a little weird. I know the student. He didn’t need to reintroduce himself. I think he just wanted me to realize his assessment was based on more than one piece of evidence.
My students appear to have more critical thinking skills and capacity for compassion than many people give them credit for. That seems important for me to know.
While puzzling over which piece of dirt he was referring to, I’m trying to clean up how I use Substack. For the time being, I will continue writing and publishing to the site, but I will only send weekly-ish (shooting for Fridays) newsletters to subscribers. I check 4 email inboxes all day, every day, and it’s fatiguing. I get it.
Email subject lines like this one make me feel jumpy:
Because of this: https://hamlineoracle.com/12236/news/dear-students/
The email is actually from the Minnesota Job Department, an “independent entity […] not associated with the state of Minnesota,” but still, just knock on my door.
Anywho . . . I’m also jumpy because an anonymous blogger messaged me at an email account for a University I work for to tell me there was a typo on the door of my office at an entirely different University I work for. The typo had been fixed long before the blogger contacted me, and they acknowledged that fact later, but I was left with the disconcerting feeling that I was being stalked (I’m not being stalked . . . maybe).
How do you know what’s on my door? And why would you feel obligated to tell me about it via a different institution’s system?
Oh, yeah. Oh, dear.
That blogger might at some point come across these things, which might complicate the blog:
The blogger should also read Amna Khalid’s Substack.
Fun Things I’m Enjoying
There actually are some fun things. For one, it looks like I will be in an honest-to-goodness art show. Like in a gallery and stuff. I’ve been tasked with creating a world. The current plan is to reimagine the realities of my amazing Great-Grandmother Ethel and her pony Mischief. I wonder if an AI-Bot could accurately tell me about my family. Or would it think she was riding her pony in outer space, rather than in Montana?
As I was playing around with ideas, I found a ranty story I wrote in 2020, just called “Ethel.” In keeping with my instruction to students to share their writing, I put it on my Substack. I was clearly in some kind of a mood in an election year. What a shock!
