Writer, educator, artist, thinker, traveler, adventurer
I apologize for the lateness of posting this. I had an unexpectedly hard time finishing the follow-up to my first installment. I actually completed it more than a week ago, but I didn’t feel good about what I’d written. It felt like the tone was all wrong. I was being too strident and too dark, … More Building the Muscular Mind (Installment Two)
We are born with brains, so we come into this life with the basic equipment needed to think, but that doesn’t mean we all have the innate ability to think well. I guess this is analogous to the fact that we have been given arms, but the average bicep looks and functions considerably differently from … More Building the Muscular Mind (Installment One)
Happy Saturday, all! I struggled this week. I wrote three or four pages on a topic that I thought would become a blog I could publish today or tomorrow, only to discover that I needed to hold off on posting it. Midway into the piece, I realized that my ideas hadn’t yet ripened and thus … More Projects and Podcasts
Hi, all. Listen up. The Pointless Overthinking management team has been as busy as a bunch of elves during the early days of December. We’ve been working behind the scenes to make major revisions to the site. Some of them have already been made manifest. However, many others, including a renaming of the website, are … More The Great Unveiling
When I was in my twenties, my favorite footwear was cowboy boots. At that time in my life—such a long time ago now—I preferred Wrangler jeans and a pair of unadorned and scuffed Tony Lamas. Just about any sort of shirt would do, but I was especially drawn to those with pearl snaps rather than … More These Boots Weren’t Made for Walking
If you’re a long-time reader of my blogs, you know that I spent about two decades living the life of an expatriated American. I am proud of that time in my life. I first went abroad as a Peace Corps Volunteer, to Poland, not long after the collapse of the Soviet system, and then lived … More Beware: Garbage In, Garbage Out
Dear Pointless Overthinking Readers: Not long ago, this blog put together a management team in preparation to do a major overhaul of this site. We have lots of ideas already, but we’d like to hear from you as we go forward. Toward that end, we’ve come up with a brief questionnaire. Completing it will take … More We’re All Ears!
My wife and I take care of a few feral cats that live in our neighborhood. They move quietly and gracefully into and out of our backyard and remind me of lithe shadows. We feed and water them, and when it got summertime hot back in early June, we constructed a crude but effective cat … More Goodbye Spunky
I’m amazed by how my mind works. I never know when an idea for a blog is going to come to me. For example, this morning, just after pulling into a parking space upon arriving at my work and then killing the engine, I immediately realized that I do a lot of the same things … More Pardon Me While I Get This Off My Chest
Many Americans are convinced that the COVID pandemic is over. Thinking this way would be a mistake. I know because my wife contracted the virus at some point recently and tested positive on Friday of last week. Despite being fully vaccinated, she’s feeling quite unwell. As a result, I’ve moved into the front bedroom—the one … More All that Jazz
This past Saturday, I got up early because I had a Zoom meeting with a Pointless Overthinking colleague who lives on the other side of the planet. Despite my best efforts, I’d gotten up a touch late and was in a hurry to get breakfast eaten so I wouldn’t be tardy for our online rendezvous. … More It’s Not a Bug; It’s a Feature
San Antonio, Texas, the city where I currently live, is located about eighty miles away from Uvalde, a town that has been in the news a lot in recent days. Unless you’ve been doing a Rip Van Winkle lately or are someone who lives outside the United States, I probably don’t need to tell you … More Uvalde, the State of the Electorate, and a Rant
I spent a good portion of this past Saturday helping my wife with her small business. She is a master baker and makes a variety of Mediterranean breads and desserts. Her goodies are artisanal and high-end. She sells them each Saturday at a farmer’s market located in Boerne, Texas, a town with a large German-speaking … More Sacred Places
I’m a busy guy. I manage two writing centers at a community college in San Antonio, Texas, USA. That takes fifty hours per week. My wife has a business that I help with. I take care of her purchasing, public relations, and I occasionally assist her with sales. On top of all that, I write, … More Pardon Me While I Ramble
Note: This blog was originally published as an Op-Ed in the San Antonio Express-News. I’m republishing it here today because it relates nicely with Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation, a book I’m reading and one I wrote about in my most recent Pointless Overthinking blog. *** I am an American educator. My job … More Community Colleges Are Helping to Transform America
Some weeks ago, I checked out Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation, by Paulo Freire and Antonio Faundez, from the library at the college where I work. Yesterday, after having the book sit around unread since I’d taken it home, I decided the time was right and opened it up. I’m not far enough … More Participating in Something New and Special
What is your biggest frustration right now and what do you plan to do (if anything) to resolve this situation? (If you want, you can name more than one here.) I’ll go first. I’m frustrated that I have so few opportunities to wander the globe the way I used to. Plus, my current job monopolizes … More Question of the Day: Number 554
Not long ago, I wrote a piece about thinking that prompted lots of reaction. After publishing it, my mind moved on to other topics. Recently, though, like in the last couple of days or so, I started thinking about thinking again. As you can probably tell, thinking is one my favorite activities. We think for … More I’ve Been Doing Even More Thinking about Thinking
Several days ago, I invited my wife out for a meal at Hong Kong Harbor, a buffet-style restaurant that serves Chinese, Japanese, and Korean food. Toward the end of our time at the eatery, a waiter dropped off two fortune cookies. I’ve gotten some really good advice and words of wisdom over the years, so … More I Ate the Cookie
As someone who manages a couple of writing centers at Palo Alto College in San Antonio, Texas, USA, I’m often asked, by faculty members of one sort of another, to do writing workshops for students. Exactly one week ago today, I did a critical thinking activity with a class of writers. It’s a workshop I’ve … More I’ve Been Thinking about Thinking