Volunteer Explorer

To commemorate the night when the veil between the world of seeing and the world of being is at its thinnest, I give you a Halloween Haiku: The cold comes creeping on dead-leaf treads of deep things entombed in lost dreams. Happy spookifying.

As week eight of the semester comes to a close, bringing us past the halfway point, I find myself counting down my time left at the university. Seven weeks, or fourteen days of showing up plus 91 hours of online tutoring, encompass the entirety of my remaining commitment to this institution. Quantified like that, I am not at all certain I will be able to do it. And even though I have some anxiety about launching myself into the uncertain realm of freelancing, every day that I tutor makes me more certain that I do not want to tutor anymore. The futility of it is overwhelming me. Here is one example: A student came to me last week for help on her Basic Writing essay. Basic Writing is a developmental class, meaning it is designed to help students who did not score high enough to be technically eligible for college level courses gain the writing (or math) skills they need to take English Composition 1 (or a first-year level math course). The majority of students in Basic W...

At the risk of sounding out of touch with the current trend, I want to say that I have not been sexually assaulted. Per se. That is not to say that I have not experienced misogyny, disrespect or pain due to my gender. It’s just that I don’t really know how to qualify my experience. And maybe that’s a similar predicament for other women, as well. Let me share. Many years ago, I was at a bar/restaurant in downtown Akron with some friends. It’s a place that still physically exists but is in its third or so manifestation since the time of my incident. It was a regular hangout for me and my friends; we gathered there in a group of 10 or 12 most Friday or Saturday nights to share pitchers of beer and talk increasingly loudly until one or more of us staggered out, leaving a tab that someone else had to pay in our stead. It was our rust-belt version of Cheers. This particular night, I was at a table with my husband and our best friend. There might have been a fourth person, probably a...

1. First, there was a sudden, sharp stomach cramp around noon on Tuesday. This quickly faded into 2. A sudden, sharp bowel cramp. This one lingered and throbbed until it became so distracting that I had to leave my job. 3. In the car, I got the “hot spits” that often come on just before puking. I managed to talk myself into keeping it down while I drove. 4. Fever took hold pretty quickly after I got to my mother’s condo. I had been cat-sitting for her and wanted to make sure everything was in order, as she was due back the next day. The pain of fever is so intimate and overwhelming as to be akin to a lover. That deep-bone ache and those spasmodic, convulsive chills put one out of one’s mind the way mind-blowing sex can—but in a completely opposite way. 5. The bowel cramps very quickly localized to a sharp, angry, insistent, poking pain in my lower right abdomen. Through that long afternoon and night, I sipped water constantly and sat on the toilet periodically, thinkin...