I’m finished with my first semester as a studio arts major at Kent State University. I am not sure whether I’ll be registering for a second one. There were pros and cons about the experience, and I am not sure if one set outweighed the other. Regardless, I am on sabbatical this spring, have two books to complete, and figured I would do well not to be trekking back and forth in an hours worth of snow and ice over the next few months from my home to the school. So, I am taking a semester off, and I have become one of those retention risks. I am grateful for the opportunity to reflect on the experience with only minimal consequence to my bank account and my (laughing) future in the arts.
It wasn’t a bad experience; it wasn’t a good one either, really. I learned some things in drawing, but I am very much on the fence about my experience in sculpture. For starters, I imagined playing with clay and making pinch pots while some Swayzesque spirit from beyond rubbed my shoulders. Instead, I was more Jessica Beal with a welding mask, except, instead of wearing a swanky black leotard and off-the-shoulder-slouch-dance tunic, I was wearing ugly jeans and steal-toed shoes under the green welding suit that had half-dollar size holes in it. The protective gear only partially worked; I was scared of the tools after a classmate almost lost a finger; and the top of my hair went up in smoke when a spark shot under my ill-fitting Vader hat on week two. I put it out quickly, fortunately.
When I began to research our family tree, my father told me that his grandfather George Christ emigrated from Germany because he was a socialist. I eventually learned that it was not George Christ but his parents, Thomas Christ and Anna Maria Hemmerlein, who emigrated from Bavaria. Thomas died in 1863 when George was an infant and George died in 1895 when my grandfather was an infant, which explains how their stories got confused.
I introduced the volume 
During the summer of 2005, I was living alone on Venus Street, in New Orleans’ Gentilly Terrace neighborhood, in a small Craftsman cottage I’d purchased two years earlier after breaking up with my longtime partner. I loved the house: modest yet gracious, it had a dining room with French doors that opened onto a screened porch, gleaming wood floors, cove ceilings, numerous multi-paned windows, a large bedroom, and a comfortable study looking out on royal palm trees where a flock of green parrots nested. I liked to think it resembled the home my parents had left behind in Cairo, Egypt when they emigrated to the U.S. in 1951.
A few months ago 
When the dust settled after November 9, 2016, many were looking for a better 2017. Alas, 2017 was one of the roughest, heaviest, and revelatory years in the last twenty years. 2017 shook many to their cores. Every morning seemed to bring new horrors, new mountains to climb, and more piles of ridiculousness to shift through. And it didn’t seem to relent. Every moment, every hour was met with baited breath. Is this the moment that our world falls apart? Is this the moment we wake up from this nightmare?
Feminism and Religion 