Unread Books

In August 1974, a middle aged woman named Connie Converse packed some belongings into her Volkswagen Beetle and drove away from her Michigan home.  She has not been seen or heard from since.

The event never made the news at the time.  Her family, which had been out of town on vacation when Connie left, did not report her missing.  She had left them letters explaining her absence.  Connie had shown signs of discontent for a while and had hinted she might go away.  There wasn’t much to hold her down anyhow.  She was single, and her position as managing editor for a prestigious academic journal had just been eliminated after it moved its base from the University of Michigan to Yale.

Connie would have remained unknown to the world outside her family and friends but for the discovery of a remarkable set of artifacts.  During the 1950s Connie had tried to make a go of it in New York City as a singer-songwriter.  She met with limited success.  She had difficulty finding acceptance for her music.  It didn’t fit into the formulaic pop genre of the era.  The nascent Greenwich Village folk scene favored traditional ballads and protest songs.  A friend secured an appearance for Connie on Walter Cronkite’s CBS morning show in 1954, but nothing came of it.

The friend, Gene Deitch, was an animator by trade but his hobby was making sound recordings.  And so, at Deitch’s home in Westchester County, Connie performed her songs for posterity.  They were not heard again until 2004 when Deitch was invited to share his recordings on the public radio program Spinning on Air.  Connie’s witty and personal songs touched a nerve with the listening public.  Beginning in 2009, several editions of her compilation album How Sad, How Lovely have been released.  (There are a number of postings of the album on YouTube.  Here’s one.)

Connie eventually gave up on being a professional musician, settling into an obscure existence.  (The best known member of the Converse family was her younger brother Philip, who coauthored a seminal text in my field of academic endeavor.)  But the restlessness seems to have remained.  By any measure, Connie (née Elizabeth) was a remarkable individual.  The daughter of a strict Baptist minister, Connie chafed at her small town New England upbringing.  Graduating high school with top honors, she followed her mother and her grandmother before her to Mount Holyoke College where she excelled.  After two years, she quit.

It just happened to be music where Connie wanted to make her mark.  However, she was also a gifted painter, sculptor, and prose writer.  Her lyrics give voice to the frustrations brought on by the straitjacket of social convention inhibiting middle class women in midcentury America.   “Roving Woman” is a particular favorite of mine.  Connie sings of going to bars alone and playing poker with men at a time when respectable dining establishments with saloons would only seat accompanied ladies at dinnertime.  Ladies by themselves in standalone watering holes?  Scandalous.

Connie’s private life was a mystery even to those closest to her.  Her brother Phil recalls never meeting a boyfriend.  (He conceded in an interview before his own death that she may have been a lesbian.)  Photos of Connie in her thirties portray a slightly enigmatic figure.  Bespectacled, fair haired, she was a pretty but ordinary woman.  Her expression reveals little and inspires idle wonder rather than answers.

Aside from the accounts of the people in her life, and the letters she sent to them when she vanished, Connie herself didn’t say much about the mounting frustration her unmet potential caused her.  In an attempt to alleviate her discontent, family and friends pooled their money and sent Connie on a six-month sabbatical in Britain the year before she fell out of sight.  Her mother took her along on a vacation to Alaska to help Connie snap out of her funk.   

To no avail.  Connie had already lost her academic publishing career.  Her doctor then delivered the news she would have to have a hysterectomy.  Brother Philip suggested that this may have deepened her depression since it precluded having children, though at age fifty this would have been a remote prospect. 

So wither Connie Converse?  Philip believed that she was a suicide, driving off a bridge to her death since her car was never found.  (So much for the vaunted buoyancy of the original VWs.)  It does appear to be the most satisfying explanation.  Her Social Security number has not been used since 1974 nor her death reported.  No claimed sightings of her have ever been verified.  If alive, she would be ninety years old.  It’s possible, though unlikely given that Connie was a heavy smoker and drinker. 

The only parallel I can find with Connie’s disappearance was the presumed 1955 suicide of a contemporaneous artist, the poet, novelist, songwriter, filmmaker, and painter Weldon Kees.  Kees left his San Francisco apartment on a summer afternoon never to be seen again.  His car was found on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, keys in the ignition.  Kees, too, had been depressed in the weeks before going missing and had spoken of wanting to kill himself.  Then again, he had also mentioned decamping to Mexico so who knows?  No body was ever discovered, which gives us license to speculate.

My thoughts on Connie Converse?  I think in her lifetime she suffered the pains of the gifted and sensitive who go unappreciated.  She was an unread book on the shelf, gathering dust.   It’s strange and poignant, though, that a true polymath such as she should have waited forty years after her departure (real or metaphorical) to finally be noticed by critics and a mass audience alike.  We can chalk some of this up to the limits on women her generation experienced.  Perhaps her art was simply out of synch with her times.

I find the lack of reaction to her leaving a bit disconcerting but perhaps reasonable given she had voluntarily absented herself.  We are all at risk of falling through the cracks despite the panopticon nature of our monitored public spaces and the migration online of personal relationships.  I’m reminded particularly of the bizarre demise of Joyce Vincent, the woman who died suddenly in her London flat in 2003 while wrapping Christmas presents and watching TV not to be discovered for another three years.  No one seemed to have noticed her absence.  She was estranged from her family but was an attractive, vivacious woman popular with her co-workers.  Surely she had friends who might have checked up on her.  But it was only when her rent was sufficiently in arrears that the authorities entered the apartment only to find Joyce’s skeletonized remains. 

Joyce Vincent was yet another unread book.  It's a pity there are so many, many more resting on the shelves.

  

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Away from It All

The World’s Greatest Blog may just have stumbled over its own mordant humor.

A colleague who rhetorically asked to be killed because s/he didn’t have the strength left to end it all was met with a flurry of concern that s/he might be a potential suicide.

That said, an email this morning from my department chair announcing additional section cuts for the upcoming semester could very well push this proffie over the edge…

Xmas Flix

I have spent the past two weeks holed up at home.  When you live in a resort town whose principal industry is catering to well-heeled skiers and snowboarders, Christmas is the season for some of us to hunker down.

It hasn’t helped that it has snowed pretty steadily; no sooner would one storm pass through then another followed.  Out of curiosity I’ve been monitoring road conditions on the state highway department’s website.  (I say “out of curiosity” because ordinarily I do so for my own safety since I drive over mountain passes to get to work.)  Despite the heavy snow and whiteout conditions, the flatlanders were undaunted.  Over the past few days the highway patrol has been metering traffic coming up from the foothills due to congestion.

I have ventured out exactly once since the college winter hiatus began.  I was out of liquor.  True to form the supermarket was packed with families in bulky ski outfits.  After waiting fifteen minutes in the checkout line, I was finally able to set my items down on the conveyer.  The lady in front of me made note of my purchases—a liter of bourbon, a liter of scotch, and two bottles of a sleep aid.  Smiling, she gave me a knowing look and said, “Family, huh?”

“Yeah, family.”

Actually, no.  In fact I’ve been dodging voicemails all week from my relatives, whom I make a point of keeping at arm’s length.  If they were your relatives you would, too.

Needless to say, I’m not much for Christmas.  I am not a guy who decks the halls.  You won’t find a tree or a single holiday decoration in my house.  I despise the crass commercialism of the season.  My only concession this year was to send checks to my two sons.  Let ‘em do their own shopping.

There is one exception to my antipathy.  There are certain films which are must-see viewing for me this time of year.  My absolute favorite is Scrooge, the adaptation of A Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim.  Somehow I missed that one this year.  Not to worry, there are two more titles which hold a similarly warm place in my heart.

The first is the venerable It’s a Wonderful Life.  It’s kind of strange that I would have an affinity for this kind of movie.  Fantasy stories don’t really appeal to me.  The dialogue is unbelievably corny, even for a Frank Capra film.  And even as a kid I found the idea of angels, let alone guardian angels, absurd.   

No matter, I was sure to catch NBC’s customary Christmas Eve airing.  (It’s a Wonderful Life is in the public domain which means it’s freely available online.  But somehow it just feels right to watch it on TV every December 24^th.)  As I watched, I tried to figure out just what it was I liked about the movie.  I still don’t have one definitive answer but I think I can pin down a few things.

Capra excelled at encapsulating classic Americana.  Bedford Falls was nothing like the small town I grew up in.  The neighbors were much friendlier and considerate than mine.  People in the movie behaved as if they lived in a community and looked out for each other.  And what small town boy wouldn’t have wanted to marry a girl like Mary Hatch?  (Or Donna Reed, for that matter?)  Notwithstanding the idyllic nature of the town, however, I could certainly identify with protagonist George Bailey and his yearning to escape and see the world.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of It’s a Wonderful Life is the David and Goliath story of George and the Bailey family’s tiny building and loan consistently thwarting the designs of wealthy banker Mr. Henry Potter.  George was the epitome of the stammering, sincere Everyman character James Stewart perfected.  Likewise, Potter was typical of the crabby old men Lionel Barrymore played toward the end of his career.  (The wheelchair Potter occupied was a necessity for Barrymore, who suffered from crippling arthritis.) 

The symbolism of the contest of wills between the two men is subversive in the contemporary cultural context.  Potter is just the kind of individual held up as an exemplar for today’s economic elites.  A “job creator” who treats his employees as disposable vassals, Potter is devoid of sentimentality.  His resort to common theft to bring down his rival would nowadays be seen as a minor peccadillo.  On the other hand, George would be held up as a poor businessman because he puts people ahead of profit.  To portray Potter as the bad guy sets American cultural values—our actual values, not the ones we purport to hold—on their ear.

Stripped of the spiritual mumbo-jumbo and its over-idealized take on small town America, It’s a Wonderful Life is an anachronism with the right message for our age.  That’s why I like it so much.

My second must-see classic is a movie I’m actually old enough to have seen in a theater during its first run.  I was dragged unwillingly to see A Christmas Story as a high schooler during a custodial visitation weekend with my father and stepmother.  I was expecting a stinker, given my dad’s taste in cinema.  (He particularly loved Burt Reynolds' movies from the ‘70s and ‘80s, each of which was essentially a protracted car chase scene.)  Any movie we saw also had to have a plot and character development simple enough for my stepmother to follow.  (After seeing Sophie’s Choice, she complained of not understanding what it was about.  I don’t know why dad married her, but it certainly wasn’t for her smarts.)

Having set my expectations low, I ended up being bowled over by A Christmas Story.  It definitely helped that it was adapted from several of Jean Shepherd’s short stories about his Indiana childhood.  I’d just discovered Shep, having been recommended to me by my English teacher, and I was already familiar with the adaptations of the Ralph Parker stories aired on PBS’s American Playhouse back when the network still offered a respectable volume of quality programming.  (Note: Endless rebroadcasts of Downton Abbey are not an acceptable substitute.)

More time would pass before I learned of Shepherd’s career as a proto-hipster with a late night radio show in 1950s New York City.  Jean Shepherd’s Night People was a freeform program which garnered a cult following among college students.  Shep would speak to his listeners as if they were discerning cultural coconspirators against what he called “creeping Meatballism;” that is, the pervasiveness of the prosaic tastes of the square “day people.”  

Shepherd’s audience was a loyal one.  John Cassavetes’ first feature, Shadows (1959), was financed in part by contributions from the “Night People”—an early example of crowdfunding.  Shepherd also liked to tweak his audience’s noses now and then.  After discussing a racy, albeit nonexistent novel titled I, Libertine, on his show there were so many inquiries about where the book could be bought that Shepherd upped the ante by hastily writing an actual novel under the nom de plume Frederick R. Ewing.  Shep’s photo, captioned as author Ewing, adorned the dustjacket.

It is most unlikely that a program like Night People would be commercially viable today.  Even Shepherd made the migration to public broadcasting in the 1970s.  However, much of the entertainment content on public radio, such as This American Life, The Radio Reader, or The Moth Radio Hour, tend to speak to the interests and concerns of liberal suburbanites.  It’s all good programming, but it doesn’t take many chances.  Meatballism triumphant. 

But, back to A Christmas Story.  Shep is at his best here, playing it straight.  Directed by Bob Clark, whose best known other movie was Porky’s, A Christmas Story is a paean to childhood wonder and anticipation.  Set circa 1940 in northern Indiana, nine year old Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley) lives with his father, The Old Man (Darren McGavin), his mom (Melinda Dillon), and his whiny younger brother Randy (Ian Petrella).  The voiceover narration is provided by Ralphie as an Adult (Shep Himself).

The plot is episodic.  The A-plot chronicles Ralphie’s dogged quest to receive a Red Ryder BB gun as a present.  At every turn, Ralphie is discouraged with the warning, “You’ll shoot your eye out!” by everyone from Mom to his teacher to the department store Santa.  But family comedies must have happy endings, and we learn at the end that The Old Man came through for Ralphie with a surprise extra gift Christmas morning.

A Christmas Story works because it’s relatable, showcasing Shepherd’s talent for wringing humor from the most ordinary childhood and family experiences.  (Paradoxically, Shep wasn’t much of a family man.  He was married four times that we know of, and he never bothered with his children again after he left them and their mother.)  Everything from Ralphie’s friendship with Flick and Schwartz (recurring characters in the Ralph stories) to dealing with bullies Scut Farkus and Grover Dill to the discovery your favorite programs are just vehicles to sell stuff are all familiar notwithstanding the retro setting of the film.

The B-plots are gems in themselves.  The Old Man wins a “major award” for solving crossword puzzles, which turns out to be a lamp in the shape of a woman’s leg clad in a fishnet stocking with a lampshade as a skirt.  Mom disapproves and the major award is shattered when it “accidentally” falls to the floor.  Ralphie sends off for a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring which turns out to decode nothing but radio ads for Ovaltine.  Ralphie rats out his pal Schwartz when he utters the F-word after a mishap helping The Old Man change a flat tire.  Christmas dinner is ruined when the neighboring Bumpus hounds enter the Parker kitchen and tear apart the unattended turkey.

I don’t think I really expected A Christmas Story to become a holiday perennial, but it’s easy to understand why it’s stood the test of time.  It’s certainly the best known of Jean Shepherd’s works among the general public.   And it’s a damned shame his other writings and broadcast work have kind of fallen into obscurity since Shep died in 1999.  But then, Shepherd never held himself out as an artist for the masses.  The definition of hipness is fluid and ever changing.  So there is the probability that Shepherd’s humor doesn’t translate well anymore.

I have my fingers crossed for a revival notwithstanding.  And in the meantime, we’ll always have A Christmas Story.  Particularly when TBS airs it repeatedly every Christmas Day.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar  

Here...then Gone...then Back Again (Or, The Neverending Saga of The Miz)

Well, that was…brief. 

Just weeks after I hailed the latest successor to the World’s Greatest Blog, the Academic Mizery Machine, it's gone dark.  By “dark,” I don’t mean that the site is no longer active.  I mean that the latest Miz has been taken down from Blogger altogether.  Dark.  Pfffft.  Gone. 

However, there’s no need for despair.  After some drama involving the last site's moderator and a troll or two, yet another doughty colleague has undertaken to resume the Misery at the old address.

Enjoy!

Midyear Postmortem

It’s over.  Final grades are in.  Fall semester is complete. 

All told, it was one of my better semesters of late.  (I’ve probably jinxed myself by writing this; now some disgruntled student will crawl from the woodwork to jam me up.)   All but one of my five sections had their fair share of engaged learners.  I’m guessing this is because most of them met in the morning or early afternoon, though my one evening section was okay too. The outlier was my Monday-Wednesday midafternoon section, which had comparatively low enrollment and contained the typical listless lot of “traditional” community college students.

A couple of my classes were pleasant surprises.  When I discovered both contained a large percentage of early-college program high school kids I felt a sense of trepidation if not dread.  My fears were misplaced, though the character of each section differed.  The first was kind of rambunctious since most of them sat together.  Nevertheless, they managed to endear themselves to me as the weeks passed despite my normal curmudgeonly dislike of teenagers.  It was kind of like the college gave me a box of puppies for the semester. The youngsters in the second section were somewhat more restrained but were pleasant company for the most part.

I kept reminding myself to enjoy what I could while it lasted.  I am now facing what may well be a protracted decline in my professional and personal lives.  Next semester I’m teaching a reduced schedule with a strong possibility that at least one section won’t “make” (enrollment). 

There are other factors contributing to my low mood this week.  Just after Thanksgiving an administrative assistant whom I worked with for years passed away suddenly, the second death of a friend and coworker in three months.  A series of snowstorms has brought hope for an end to a multiyear drought where I live, but the cold and the absence of sunlight is wearing on me.  Things continue to break around the house but I don’t feel sufficiently motivated to fix them.  I’m sleeping a lot but don’t feel rested when I’m awake.  I’m still dealing with the myriad minor afflictions that have bothered me for more than a year.  A few weeks ago it turned out that the malaise I was feeling for a spell last July and August may have been the product of a periodontal infection the damage from which required oral surgery to repair.  (Apologies for the TMI.)

There are reasons for me to be cheerful, though.  I’ve landed a summer school assignment for next year.  I’ve had one conference paper accepted for the spring, and a decision is pending on another one for a conference in June.  Best of all, I received an invitation from out of the blue to participate in a colloquium in South Africa this summer.  (Our summer, not theirs.)  It’s a long trip to be sure, and an expensive one, but there is a good chance that it will lead to my first ever peer-reviewed journal article.  Quite the feather in my cap if I pull it off.

Then again, nothing I do seems to impress my bosses.  Teaching awards, better than average student ratings, acing my classroom teaching evaluation, active participation in academic conferences, publishing a journal article, doesn’t matter.  I draw dog sections which can never attract high enough enrollment to avoid cancellation, I’m rebuked for minor complaints from students in the wrong, and the administration brings in additional instructors who are given classes which used to be mine.

I’m not the only one.  During the semester I struck up a friendship with a new adjunct prof who, like me, came to academia in middle age.  Despite rave reviews from colleagues and students alike, she was passed over for a temporary full time position and given a reduced schedule in the spring to boot.   Needless to say when she told me about this she was quietly seething.  There was a silver lining, though.  Her thesis advisor from graduate school invited her to teach at his institution where I’m sure she’ll knock ‘em dead.

It’s nice to have choices.  Another adjunct I’ve long considered a rival confided in me a while back that he was planning to go back to school for his doctorate or to earn a K-12 credential.  Being part-time faculty was too hit-or-miss, he told me.  Yeah, it is that. 

Unfortunately I’m too old to make a go at a new career.  Opportunities for men over forty are limited.  I still have a son in school, so (voluntary) retirement is not an option.  Most importantly, remaining in academia for me is worth fighting for.  It’s the third career I’ve followed in my lifetime and, notwithstanding the barrage of complaints I have posted on this blog over the years, it’s the only one I’ve loved.  And notwithstanding my position on the lowest rung of the professional ladder, I have not received as much respect in the community as I have as a teacher and academic.  It would be very painful to walk away from that.

At least for the next couple of weeks I will be spared the possibility of further bad news since campus will shut down for the holiday break.  (I’ve never been into Christmas very much, but this year I’ve barely noticed its impossible to miss trappings.)  I didn’t plan my usual post-semester vacation in a balmy clime this year, but maybe I’ll treat myself to a few days in Vegas instead.  After all, no place on the planet is farther removed from daily reality.

And who knows?  Maybe I’ll get lucky. 

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Trauma

I’m a fan of the journalism aggregator website, Longform.  This morning I read this piece linked to the site from the Washington Post about the recovery of a wounded survivor of October’s mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.

Before I go on, I should tell you a couple of things about myself.  The first, which you might know already if you’ve read anything else on this site, is that I’m a community college instructor.  For this reason I closely follow news of campus shootings silently praying that neither my students nor I ever fall victim to one.

The second thing, which I have only alluded to in passing in earlier posts, is that I am a trauma survivor.  I was impaled through the chest in a peacetime training accident while serving overseas with the military.  The injury left me permanently disabled.  I was hospitalized for two months, most of the first spent in the ICU.  It took me more than three years to fully adjust and find my “new normal” before I could begin to rebuild my life.

I don’t discuss this much.  While I suspect that the people who know me casually are aware I’m different I’m able to conceal much of the extent of my disability.  I wear long sleeved shirts year round to cover my withered right arm and few people, even family members, have seen the numerous wound and surgical scars that cover my body from my neck to my knees.  When I meet people for the first time they’re mildly surprised when I offer my left hand to shake but they don’t seem to notice much else.  I must say I’m pleased with my ability to pass as a normal, whole person most of the time.  I live alone without help, I’ve travelled the world by myself despite my disability, and I work at a job from which I derive great satisfaction.  Things could be much worse.

Which brings me to the 16 year old girl profiled in the Washington Post.  Eight weeks are a very short time to recover from the severe injuries she experienced and it is not reasonable to expect her to be her best self.  Nevertheless, the article paints a portrait of a very unappealing individual.  She is verbally abusive to everyone around her including her chronically ill mother.  She is demanding yet ungrateful.  Aside from a brief remark that she did nothing to help during the attack she seems devoid of sympathy for or even awareness of the other victims.  Her family members must explain every routine movement about the house lest they startle her unnecessarily.  It’s all about her.

I suspect she was a godawful brat well before the shooting, self-centered, narcissistic, and rude.  I strongly suspect her family insisted on treating her as exceptional throughout her young life.  To a degree it’s a characteristic of her generation.  It’s also true that illness makes most of us short tempered. 

But there are limits.  This girl has a lot going for her if she would just stop a moment and realize it.  She has the full support of her mom and brothers and the concern of her community.  I wish I had had a fraction of the support she enjoys.  My marriage collapsed during my own recovery while my mother and sisters used a power of attorney granted to manage my affairs to help themselves to my assets.  

Once home I was left unattended for long periods of time, during which I had to shift for myself.  I spent the many hours alone reliving the accident in my mind, memories which continue to surface years later.  Naturally I had my irritable moments, but for the most part I was my normal, polite self, with “please” this and “thank you” that in the face of the indifference of those entrusted with my care.  Most importantly I resolved to carry on even though it meant starting over with nothing.

My takeaway from the article was the lack of resiliency in our current crop of youth.  Over the past year or so articles in academic journals and “trade” periodicals such as The Chronicle of Higher Education have commented on counselors and administrators who warn faculty not to discuss things which might “trigger” bad memories or negative emotions in students.  I’ve received similar warnings from the institutions where I teach, as if I’m supposed to know the full personal history of each individual in my classes.  The subject I teach requires discussing controversial topics from time to time, so it’s not a matter of if but when a student will bring a complaint regardless of how carefully or circumspectly I present the material.  I am not sure which is worse, the potentially violent student or the prospect of having students like Umpqua Girl in my classroom.

The girl’s physical injuries will heal.  She can learn to cope with the emotional pain, which will dull though not disappear with the passage of time.  She has every opportunity to lead a normal life.  But from what I read, I think she will wring the shooting for all it’s worth for as long as she can.   She will mope, she will malinger, she will gradually leach the very life from those around her.  Rather than fulfill her responsibility to the dead to live a productive life to the best of her ability, the young woman profiled in the Post article shows every sign of spending her many remaining days draining the energy of those around her while producing nothing of value in return.

I am truly sorry for all those harmed in the Umpqua Community College shooting.  No one deserves such suffering.  But survivors have a choice.  They can move forward, pain be damned, or they can mire themselves along with their family and friends in the misery of a moment irrevocably past. 

It’s too bad that this young person has chosen the latter.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Jive S**t for Rich (or at least Affluent) White Folks

A number of years ago, a wise soul left this graffito on the gate of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur: “Jive Shit for Rich White Folks.” 

I can empathize.  Too often, I find myself shaking my head at the tastes of people with too much time and money on their hands.  So, in the spirit of skewering their penchant for fads, expensive pastimes, and belief in bunk, I’ve made my own list of jive based on observations from living in a resort town populated with folks who are well-off and (mostly) white:

Self-branding

Playdates

Being a “foodie”

The Secret

Cocooning

Kombucha

REI

Helicopter parenting

Wearing tie dye, dreadlocks, and peace symbols while majoring in business and voting Republican

Loudly proclaiming one’s environmentalism while creating a larger than necessary CO2 footprint by taking ski vacations in Switzerland and making “spiritual pilgrimages” to Nepal

Probiotics

Following one’s bliss

Adventure travel

Ecotourism

Mindfulness

Life coaching

Life hacking

Radical forgiveness (Believe it or not, this is actually a thing.)

Anything advertised as “organic”

Reading anything by Joseph Campbell

Watching anything with Joseph Campbell

Tai chi

Feng shui

Gap years spent doing anything but charitable work or earning tuition money

Jungian psychology

Being an anti-vaxxer

Yoga

New Age philosophy

Artisanal products

TED Talks

I’ll probably come up with more later, but these are a good start.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar