Letter from Home | A collection of essays originally written for Flagstaff Live!

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Game Theory; I Give You My Wordle

Game Theory; I Give You My Wordle

Posted by on Aug 25, 2022

Each morning I ARISE, brush my TEETH, heat some WATER, make some TOAST and THINK about my day. But first I open Wordle, the tasty online word game less than a year old and more addictive than potato chips. In an interview with the BBC earlier this year, game inventor Josh Wardle said his aim was to make Wordle something akin to “a delightful snack.” And so...

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And there it was; The return of collective effervescence in my classroom

And there it was; The return of collective effervescence in my classroom

Posted by on Feb 24, 2022

It was about a week ago, a late Thursday afternoon. Outside the classroom windows, golden hour saturated the light with amber. My advanced writing class had just concluded. Seven students Zooming in through laptops vanished from the checkerboard of faces on the projector screen in front of the room. At my university, we are hybrid teaching, a...

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First love: Where are you Lawrence Perez?

First love: Where are you Lawrence Perez?

Posted by on Dec 16, 2021

On a muggy August day before my fifth grade school year was to begin, Mom circled my three brothers, my sister and me. She told us that we were moving to Indiantown, a scratchy, green patch of inland South Florida that we’d visited a few times. Indiantown was all I knew of “the country.” Mom said we’d be moving in a week and living in Indiantown in a...

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The Bins; Goodwill Hunting

The Bins; Goodwill Hunting

Posted by on Nov 4, 2021

Fred went to prowl for vinyl. Audria was a frequent flyer who lasered in on collectible china. Aude and her husband had the eye for mid-century modern in the midst of cheap motel room castoffs. I was fixated on classroom globes from the USSR era. We weren’t a group, but almost every weekend we were regulars at The Bins, the unofficial name of a long gone...

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Gray matters: It’s the color of the year

Gray matters: It’s the color of the year

Posted by on Sep 23, 2021

Longtime L’Oréal face Andie MacDowell showed up on my Facebook feed last week throwing shade on the anti-aging industrial complex. In an interview with The Zoe Report, MacDowell relayed that she was embracing her 63-year-old self by nixing hair coloring and showing her gray. After being cajoled by her children and living through the pandemic curtailment of...

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