🤔 I Was Disoriented 8/17/25

I recently found a Fruity Pebbles flavored Liquid Death, and immediately bought it. What can I say, I am a sucker for a food brand collaboration. That being said, not all food collabs are created equal, and I was worried about what I was getting myself into. Not enough to prevent me from buying it, of course, but enough to make me skeptical of the taste. Remarkably, though, this drink tastes exactly like I’m eating a bowl of Fruity Pebbles. I can’t wait to crack open a cold one with the boys, except it is just Fruity Pebbles flavored Liquid Death. This is not a sponsored post by the way, but I really appreciate that you think my newsletter could be that successful.

Now with that out of the way, let’s find out What’s Up With Will…

This week has been busy. School starts in two weeks, but this week was the Graduate Student Orientation Week. All week long, I have been in Zoom meetings getting oriented, learning about the policies, procedures, expectations, and resources for SFSU’s Graduate School. I have the emails of all of the graduate coordinators, I have my account set up, and I feel ready to take on the semester. I also learned that I need to get at least a B- in every class, so the age-old mantra, “C’s get degrees,” just doesn’t apply here. Maybe a more appropriate one here is “Not a breeze, you gotta get B’s”. I’m workshopping it.

Anyways, in preparation for my first Zoom meeting, I decided to log in and make sure that everything was up to date. It’s a good thing I did because I was able to update my old profile picture to something a tiny bit more professional. Otherwise, my future classmates would have had the displeasure of seeing me in an American tank top. That would not have been the first impression I was going for.

Another observation is that I completely forgot about the anxiety I get about joining a Zoom Meeting at just the right time. I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but I don’t want to join the meeting too early and seem too eager. I also don’t want to join too late and cast an unprofessional light upon myself. I know that it is one of my more illogical anxieties, but do any of y’all have a similar worry?

In addition to the litany of Zoom meetings this week, I also had one in-person session this Wednesday. The session started with a coffee meet and greet with the entire incoming graduate class, where we played a game of networking Bingo (which I obviously won because I got my bachelor’s degree in communication. Just wait until I get my masters in communication, and then I will be unstoppable!) Unfortunately, there were so many people, so I was only able to meet one other person with the same master’s program as I. That’s okay, though, because I am going to meet everyone pretty soon.

After the meet and greet, we met the head of the Career Development Program at SFSU, who told us about some of the resources that are provided to us.

Afterwards, we were taken on a library tour with some highlights being a makerspace, a special collections and archives, and ample room for studying. My personal favorite was a robotic library retrieval system that stores up to 1.5 million items. It feels on-brand for a university in a tech-focused city like San Francisco to have a high-tech library. No robot librarians yet, though.

We also had the opportunity to tour the Global Museum, a museum dedicated to showcasing cultural collections from around the world, run by SFSU’s Museum Studies program. The current exhibit, “Craft or Commodity”, looks at pieces originally obtained in the mid-20th century in tourist markets and examines the craftsmanship and cultural meaning of each item, exploring ideas of cultural commodification, cultural erasure, and cultural property. The museum also included an Egyptian Learning Alcove, where two mummies reside. Seeing a real-life mummy is nothing like what’s in Scooby Doo, and, if we are being honest, a little eerie.

When the tour of the museum wrapped up, I skedaddled out of there to get to another Giants game. However, since I was at an orientation session beforehand, I had to hide my Giants jersey under my sweater and tucked my bucket hat in my pocket. I didn’t want anyone in academia to know that I am a (pseudo)sports fan yet.

Since I have been going to so many games, I figured I might as well learn more about the team that I was cheering for. After reading Home Team: The Turbulent History of the San Francisco Giants by Robert F. Garratt, it turns out that they have quite a fascinating history.

It becomes apparent that baseball in the Bay Area follows a boom/bust cycle. Starting from when the Giants were still in New York, the book covers the move out to California, the fiasco of the previous ballpark, Candlestick Park, the exuberant “Humm Baby” era of Giants baseball, the 1989 World Series Earthquake, and the two almost successful attempts to move the team to another city. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the Giants’ history. And before you write it off as a baseball book, I found it was approachable for someone who isn’t a diehard fan.

Reading through the book also gave me a better appreciation for Oracle Park. I walked through and saw statues of famous players like Orlando Cepeda, one of the first Puerto Rican Major League Baseball players, and understood their significance to this franchise and the sport as a whole.

Unfortunately, the Giants are in a bust right now, as the score for the game was 1-11 against the San Diego Padres. On the ride back home, an older man from Philadelphia joked that there was no reason to come back to SF because “they don’t even have a baseball team”. I got to talking to him, and he told me about how he used to live in the Bay Area and went to games back when the Giants first moved to San Francisco. We chatted about him going to games at Candlestick Park, and the minor league stadium that housed them before Candlestick was built, watching the great Willie Mays score runs. Everything kind of came full circle.

For our date night, we went to a chain establishment called BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse. Imagine a Chili’s, but better, and they brew their own beer. This place has been on my list for the two years that we have lived in the Bay because of one thing, and one thing only: the Pizookie. This cookie pizza was just as incredible as I wanted it to be (and it was made gluten-free too for Rylee to try!) To loosely quote Pam Beesly from The Office, I felt God in this BJ’s tonight.

For the rest of the weekend, it was a lot of cleaning and organizing our place. We have a couple of guests coming into town soon, so we wanted to get everything as spick and span as possible. However, we did get to chill at the pool with some friends, and on the way to get groceries, I stopped at the Galindo Home and Gardens.

The Galindo Home and Gardens, similar to Shadelands Ranch Museum, is a historic Victorian-style ranch home and is run by the Concord Historical Society. It was built by the Galindos and Pachecos, two of Concord’s founding families, as a home for the newly married Francisco Galindo and Dolores Pacheco. The Home and the museum next door look at Concord’s history and offer a time capsule into what that agriculturally based society would have looked like at the time. They also cover the importance of the railroads in the area, supporting economic growth with the ability to ship agricultural goods, as well as playing a major role in WWII construction projects.

As I was walking around, the docent told me that Concord was once covered with vineyards and potentially could have rivaled even Napa. However, during the Prohibition, Concord farmers practically removed every vineyard, replacing it with other, more “respectable” crops at the time. And, in case you were wondering, no, Concord is not named after the grape varietal. Instead, it was based on a northeastern city, which, in my opinion, is a big missed opportunity. Just imagine if you were swirling a glass of Cabernet in a wine country named after a grape?

Speaking of Scooby Doo, I found a great new series where they tell a true crime story to someone, but it’s actually just the plot of an episode of Scooby Doo. It’s fun to see how perplexed the guests get as they hear the story.