Stars strobe like fireflies around the driver’s seat. Glowing glyphs of letters and numbers glitch and streak across the dashboard.

Have I taken that (in)famous blue pill, the newest seer to the world of the Matrix? No, the subtle rattles of the engine tell me I’m in the same red Ford I have used each semester of college.

Too bad my eyes can’t make sense of the minutes serving as milestones to uncharted depths of euphoria.

My fall semester of senior year didn’t start that way. I’d enrolled in 12 credit hours of coursework and managed my two part-time jobs.

…

May the 4th be with you. It’s a saying you hear people say or see on social media feeds. It’s one you probably heard recently, given last Monday was May 4th.

Unless you’re part of Mark Hamill’s circle, then you also heard May the 5th, 6th, up to 9th.

I see her again. I see her every Thursday afternoon between French Conversation 2 and advanced journalism.

She usually sits at her table alone. Like a lot of the students do in the lounge.

I can’t gather up the courage to say hello. Instead, it’s just me in a constant inner dialogue with the critic and perfectionist.

It’s just a hello, yet I am averse to any sense of rejection. What if she finds it weird that I approached her? What if we hold nothing in common?

So I stay at my table. I keep my head in the textbook.

…

Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia announced April 20 that the state would begin phases of reopening April 24 from a shelter-in-place order. News media copied, pasted and repasted the story ad hoc.

Reports circulated that, despite a shelter-in-place order through April 30, Mr. Kemp would reopen gyms, salons, body art studios — and bowling alleys. President Donald Trump, among others, criticized the governor. News media continued to copy, paste and repaste.

Transplanted residents of Atlanta received text messages from out-of-state friends and family members, which said

“Hope your governor isn’t being too ambitious….”

“I read that GA is opening back…

How in the world could they have made this a children’s song?

I remember saying this the first time I had come to learn the folklore meaning behind a song I’d danced to dozens and dozens of times. A song I’d in turn dance to with kids as a volunteer in summer programs.

A song that, with an arrogant snide, I considered beyond the progress of where we are today as a society.

I (we) were wrong.

There’s a tendency nowadays to not only have concepts of cultural superiority, but of generational superiority as well. It’s nothing new.

Prior to…

There’s something you should know. I’m part of that generation that’s into deconstructing the thinking patterns, power structures and unquestioned norms.

Blame it on generational sociology. Blame it on whichever scapegoat your camp prefers. But the apparent pattern of building, enjoying, questioning and undoing places mine in the latter most.

As one who grew up with a worldview influenced by an English-Puritan approach to American history, Manifest Destiny and a Reagan-like telling of a nation being a city on a hill — divorced from the Middle Eastern roots where such an image first arose — there is a healthy place…

The playground is the birthplace to some of my earliest memories of a common human experience known as arguments. Maybe yours was too?

You’ve been gathered by friends (or your toddler) to play a familiar game. Like tag, for instance.

No one necessarily recites the rules or pulls out a printed manual. Simply stating, “Let’s play tag,” brings with it a shared understanding.

Or, so one thinks.

If you were like me, half-way up the social ladder of elementary childhood classism, there was a good chance you’d wind up being chosen as “it.” …

Twenty-eighteen didn’t start like I imagined it would. Utterly alone.

It’s not that I have a problem with being alone, but it was the day that made being alone memorable, and life-changing. New Year’s Eve.

For nearly three decades, I had spent that holiday surrounded by family members and friends, dipping cheese and chocolate fondue, plopping pieces around board games and increasingly being not as impressed with the opportunity to stay up until midnight. Does anyone else remember when that felt like an incredible privilege and gift to see just what the world was up to past bedtime?

It didn’t…