Hi everyone! I hope you had a wonderful Labor Day!

You know the meme of seeing your teacher out in public and being astonished by the sobering realization that, just like you, they have their own unique and vivid personal life, or as author John Koenig puts it, sonder¹? Well, I am here to officially state that I saw some students out in public for the first time, and it feels no different when the shoe is on the other foot. The sheer shock value doesn’t get any easier to absorb, regardless of the fact that I have seen both sides of this relationship now.

After doing some looking online, it appears that this is also a shared sentiment across educators, to the point that there seems to be an entire sub-genre of the seeing your teacher out in public meme exclusively dedicated to teachers running into students (a fun rabbit hole for you to go down in your free time this week). For some reason, there’s nothing more jarring than when our educational and personal lives intersect. 

With that said, let’s find out What’s Up With Will…

Unfortunately for me, I normally don’t have class on Mondays, so Labor Day doesn’t really do anything for me. That said, I still wanted to make the most of it, and I figured what would be more Labor Day-ish than going to see a movie. One Google search online, though, proved me horribly wrong. It appears that the long weekend is one of the more begrudgingly slow weekends for theaters, to the extent that one article lambasted it as the weekend “where Hollywood movies go to die”.² Regardless, I had already committed myself to this plan, and I was going to follow through with it. No broader macro-economic trend was going to stop me.

I found the Rheem Theater, an old-timey theater that was voted the Bay Area’s best Indie Cinema back in 2015³, as well as doubled as the Classic Film Hall of Fame and Museum. And you know me well enough to know that a prestigious award with the word Best and a museum had me practically stampeding over there. I decided to grab tickets to Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and Rylee graciously decided to spend her Labor Day doing the same, on the condition that I had to answer any questions during the movie, as she is not a Marvel girlie. 

While I wouldn’t also consider myself the biggest Marvel fan, I was shocked to see just how much I knew as I explained the major characters as they appeared on-screen. On the flip side, it was cool hearing from Rylee that the scene discussing using RNA to suppress his unwanted spider genes was scientifically sound! Who knew that superhero movies could be somewhat factual?

Unfortunately, it appears that the Classic Film Hall of Fame and Museum was removed from the theater, but vestiges of it remained. Pictures of inductees like Mickey Rooney and Abbott and Costello lined the walls, even if the museum itself disappeared. It was a shame, considering that was one of the main reasons I wanted to go here in the first place. 

However, I left the theater in high spirits. I would highly recommend the new Spider-Man! Rylee also gave it a thumbs up too (although I imagine most of it was just from it being a rom-com with two of her favorite actors). Regardless, she left telling me that she would be interested in watching the previous Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, and that’s the best Labor Day gift a guy could ask for!

I’m getting back into the groove of things teaching-wise. Most importantly, I feel like I’m remembering the different style of attention and engagement that is present in a classroom rather than a normal presentation. In my opinion, a presentation is more of a one-way transmission of ideas. With teaching, I want to ask questions to the students, get their feedback, and highlight their own experience as lived knowledge. It can just be hard to break that barrier and get people talking. In this regard, I am trying to focus on ways to get them to interact with one another, like trying to rephrase my questions that don’t land, incorporating more think-pair-shares, and utilizing more small-group activities.

This week also marks the second, and final, field trip in class to the Special Collection & Archives. I did this last year (❤️ Will I Am Your Valentine! 2/15/26), but I think it remains a visceral and tactile experience to understand the SFSU Student Strike, while also allowing us to put it into perspective about our unit on culture, identity, and perception. Additionally, every year the Archives displays a new exhibit based on its material. While last year was focused on the Watsonville Strikes (🏈 Football School? 9/14/25), this year offered a more in-depth examination of the strike, giving us another curated experience of this historic campus moment.

For the study hall class, I have been neck-deep in survey response data from the students via the survey platform Qualtrics to better understand how this class can be of the most benefit to everyone taking it. While writing up my findings, it felt like I was back in methods, writing a miniature quantitative study examining potential class topics, study session meetings, and general interests of students. I am also planning on hosting a study hall with students. 

We are also in talks to work on a project to connect with alumni of the SFSU COMM department. Since COMM is one of those things that you can do anything with, it can be hard to navigate the job prospects. I think a project finding all of the alumni to see where everyone landed is a good step forward in bridging the gap between the limitless possibilities and the more limited scope of how to fit the degree in with the work world.

Another day, another wine tasting! Today’s wine appreciation class started with a PowerPoint diving into viticulture, the science of growing grapes, and viniculture, the science of winemaking. We continued going over definitions, ranging from common sense to farmer sense. We flew through explanations of terms that I have definitely heard in a tasting room, like terroir, how place impacts wine (climate, rainfall, soil, slope, elevation, etc.), and vintage, the year that the grapes of a particular wine were harvested. We also talked about a rather detailed account of the lifecycle of a grape vine. The vines are dormant in winter; then budbreak occurs in Spring; followed by veraison, or when grapes begin to appear on the vines; and, finally, the harvest in Fall. For me, this came with the realization that, in the past 3 years, I have been to Napa at each point of the grape vine’s lifecycle.

Yet this lecture also skewed scientific, hearing words that felt reserved for a laboratory rather than when tasting wine. We covered terminology like Vitis vinifera, the scientific name of the most prevalent grapevine used for wine, and how it is grafted to Vitus Labrusca, whose roots are naturally more resistant to disease. This grafting has allowed wine to continue to flourish in spite of several cataclysmic Marvel Endgame-level threats, namely the scourge of Phylloxera, a wingless species of louse that ravaged vineyards. We also dived into the process of natural selection, mutations, and crossbreeding that has led to wine staples like Pinot Gris and Chardonnay.

In the spirit of viticulture, we were tasked with conducting an independent research project growing garlic chives. We grabbed two pots: a control pot and an experimental pot with one independent variable change. I filled them to the brim with Edna’s best potting soil, and I will be tracking their growth over the semester to better understand how climate, rainfall, and terroir impact viticulture. 

We then proceeded to the wine tasting today. Similar to last week’s tasting, we were going to continue an examination of the most common grape varietals, this time with an emphasis on the cooler-climate grapes, Black Box California Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. We proceeded with the same look, smell, then taste strategy. While it was present last week, the chaos of group tasting felt more pronounced to me. When looking, people would shout out colors and color intensities. From my own personal experience, I know that there is a color chart used to describe wines, yet this class has opted to avoid covering the range of “official” wine colors. However, when the professor would talk, he would still revert to terminology found on the color chart, like pale yellow for the Chardonnay and pale ruby for the Pinot Noir, even though that vocabulary was not shared with the class. 

On the smell portion, the professor added a new layer: smelling different points of the glass will lead to different smelling notes. Everyone in class was shouting out smells: “citrus”, “pineapple”, “vanilla”. I was telling my desk mates, “fuji apple” for the chardonnay and “red cherry” for the pinot, because the professor always followed up a response of a generic fruit with, “And what type of that fruit is it?” However, I felt unconfident after each pronouncement by classmates. Was I right? Were they right? Could we both be right? I know we talked about the wine experience being individual, but I felt something deep down countering the idea that everyone can be right.

However, on the tasting, I miscategorized many aspects of both wines. I thought the Chardonnay was lower alcohol than it was (and Chardonnay generally is lower than 13.5%, but even in California’s cooler climates, it’s still hot enough to produce the higher sugar needed for a high ABV). I thought the Pinot Noir was off-dry and medium-bodied, but the professor said he felt it was dry and light-bodied. From my tasting experience in Napa, it is exceptionally easy to affirm a wine educator when they say a wine is dry, but another layer of difficulty is added when you, alone, have to ascertain its sweetness. 

Our class today focused on our cognitive tendencies and memories. As a primer, the professor asked us to write down one frustration from the day, then tear it into a million pieces and throw it out, which was a slightly cathartic way to start the class. We kept the activities going in small groups to share one positive memory and one negative memory. The catch was that as we would recite our memories, the listeners would use a deck of cards with feelings on them, pulling out the emotions that they thought the speaker went through. Interestingly, I had an easier time thinking of a positive memory over a negative memory.

We then moved on to a discussion of the readings, talking about our cognitive tendencies. ⁴While this sounds kind of obvious, there is research that shows that certain personality traits can impact our focus on the positive and the negative. For instance, extraversion is correlated with attention to positivity, and neuroticism is more closely related to attention to negativity. However, our attention to the positive and the negative is also informed by what we have noticed previously. People who notice positive things are more likely to notice more positive things. On the flip side, people who notice negative things are more likely to notice more negative things. It’s almost like a priming of sorts. Thinking back to the exercise sharing memories, it makes me think that maybe my practice of documenting my memories is a form of attention to the positive. What if focusing on sharing my life online has primed me to pay more attention to the positive in the world?

Our second reading focused on memories.⁵ Similarly here, we learned of the rather milquetoast discovery that we are more prone to remember emotional moments. That said, we are also prone to remembering only specific points of those memories that are the most emotionally charged, and the rest can be prone to exaggeration. After watching Glass Menagerie last week (🏄 Swag Surfing 9/6/26), it was fascinating to see this description of vivid memory be written out in an academic article. We also briefly brought up the power of positive memory retrieval as an emotional regulation tool, which immediately led me back to my most recent Disneyland trip where I covered reflective and restorative nostalgia (🥀 Not A Disney Adult... 7/19/26). That said, I made the unfortunate realization that the research on nostalgia does not come from AJ Wolfe’s Disney Adults: Exploring (And Falling In Love With) A Magical Subculture, but rather Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia.

We made it to the end of the week, albeit a shorter-than-usual one, so it was time for date night! This week, we went to Urban Plates, and despite what I would consider false advertising due to its suburban location, I hoped that the plates part of its name would be accurate. Thankfully, it was. I got myself the Aleppo chili glazed salmon with Brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes. Not only was it incredible, but educational, as I learned that both the Aleppo chili and Brussels sprouts were named after the cities where they became popularly cultivated.⁶ Additionally, it was great to allocate time for just the two of us. It’s always great to do date nights, but when I am not in school, we are around each other all day to share events and updates. Now that I am back to my crazy commuting schedule, I love that Rylee and I intentionally carve time out of the weekend just to focus on us!

Saturday Morning, we geared up for a hefty sports day ahead of us. First, we would be going to the SF Giants game vs the San Diego Padres. Then, we would switch gears and go to a Georgia Tech Football watch party against Tennessee. This alone already presented logistical hurdles as to what clothes we would wear to ensure that we were rooting for both teams; however, on the day of, another wrench was thrown in our plans. In the first part of the day, we would be wearing orange, playing against a team with gold colors. In our second event, we would be switching to wearing gold, rooting against a team whose primary color is orange. While I could bring my GT hoodie and cover it with the Giants game giveaway, I was going to have to wear my Giants hat and say that I was just a “Giant fan of Georgia Tech” at the watch party.

While it might seem pedantic, thinking back to my previous rambles viewing sports through the lens of performance studies (🎂 Go Rylee, It's Your Birthday! 8/9/26), even the clothes we wear are essential to the performance we are engaging with. Performance scholars see the audience as co-performers of the show that unfolds in front of us, and even our outfits showcase how we fit into team communities within the larger audience that is in attendance. ⁷I wouldn’t want the people next to me to strike up a conversation about how great the enemy team is, do I?

While our wardrobe kerfuffle might have slowed us down, we arrived just in time for the second Dog Days, where, just like the last (🍦A Ge-Lot of Food... 7/12/26), dogs paraded down the field and took over the stadium. This was their park today, and both Rylee and I were just happy to get to witness it unfold. In addition to Dog Days, it was another Fiesta Gigantes, with a long-sleeve Willy Adames Gigantes Jersey giveaway, the perfect outfit switch for a Yellow Jacket-Giants fan.

About halfway through the Giants game, a beer vendor walked through our section with a cardboard Modelo box crown, and I asked him where a man could get a hat like that. Upon asking, he whipped out a second Modelo box and handed it to me. As luck would have it, the box was blue and gold, so it fixed my GT hat issue. Georgia Tech was always a drinking school with an engineering problem, too, so the hat might have been even more on brand. 

Unfortunately, the situation was looking not great for the Giants, so we decided to do our costume change before hightailing it out of Oracle Park for the Yellow Jacket watch party at Local Tap SF. On our walk, we learned that the Giants lost 6-7, which is a vastly overdone meme-y way to lose, I must say.

Upon walking into Local Tap, we were greeted by multiple Georgia Tech Flags and banners, custom coasters (which I might have nabbed one), and a group of fellow Yellow Jackets cheering on the team. While we were in great company, our team played less great, losing 24-45.

While my Football knowledge is by no means extensive, I do have a reason for why Georgia Tech lost. This past season, GT recruited a 3 Star Defensive end by the name of Lex Willis⁸, but his role is exclusively on the reserve roster. He saw absolutely no play this game. While my motivations for advocating for Willis are entirely selfish, driven by my desire to get a Willis GT jersey, I believe that if we put Lex Willis on the field, our team would have had the spark we needed to win the game. And you can not tell me otherwise. Put me in, Coach!

Here’s hoping they heed my advice for next week. Fingers crossed!

Never would I have imagined that former iCarly star Miranda Cosgrove would be explaining to me scientifically why I have less friends than the rest of my friends, but this is what my algorithm had suggested to me.