Hi Everyone!

In order to stay in touch with my old fraternity pals, we created a Discord, and for the past month, the #wordlesque text channel (a channel dedicated to sharing your scores on browser-based games) has been ablaze with messages about a new game called Gauntle(t)¹. For most of that time, I have been passively reviewing everyone’s times throughout my day, but yesterday, I was in dire need of a break. I figured, why not try out this new game? My friends play it every day, so I thought it might be a great way to decompress for a few minutes. Oh boy, was I wrong…

I read through the rules of Gauntle(t). It is composed of 11 games you complete back to back, with the goal of completing them in the fastest possible time. Additionally, you also score bonuses and penalties based on how well you play to decrease or increase your overall time. I am not one for reading extensive rules, so I skimmed it and clicked the start button (I liken this to skipping over the T&Cs every time they pop up). 

First up was a sudoku puzzle, which I completed in 2:45.84 and got a 10-second bonus for solving it without a hint. Nice! Next came Wordy, which, despite Wordle-ing daily, I was unable to solve and received a 60-second penalty. The worst was yet to come. I suffered my way through the 9 other games, including a particularly awful round of Takuzu, Minesweeper, and Queens, barely eking out a sub-22 minute run. I ran the August 23rd Gauntle(t) in 21:49.50. I think I left the game more stressed than I entered. Props to the creator for developing such an effective medieval torture device. I’ll probably play it again, though, if we are being honest.

Anyway, let’s find out What’s Up With Will…

It’s the week before the start of a new semester, and you know what that means! Another week where I realized just how disoriented I have been (and spoiler alert, it’s twice the usual amount). I was in two orientations for the entirety of this past Tuesday to get myself oriented to school again, particularly on the lecturer side of things. My calendar was so chock-full of orientations that I had to miss part of both sessions. My one saving grace, though, was that both orientations were online.

My first orientation for the day was for New Metro Faculty. For those who are unaware, Metro is a program at San Francisco State University that effectively acts as a redesign of the first two years of higher education². Students are put into learning communities and tackle Gen Ed classes together, all the while being offered wraparound support services. A majority of the students are first-generation college students, and the ultimate goal is to help tackle education inequity, develop critical consciousness, and foster solidarity. One of the Public Speaking classes I am teaching is a Metro class, and I am excited to join the program!

Over the course of the orientation, we learned about the resources available to the Metro program. Throughout the orientation, critical pedagogy also reared its head as we discussed particular student-centered strategies that break passive learning and offer opportunities for questioning what narratives we are producing/reproducing. Most of these strategies had an activity or role-play component to them, too, emphasizing learning through engagement rather than rote memorization.

I then hopped over to my Fall 2026 Public Speaking Graduate Teaching Associate Orientation, which took a more introspective turn. As everyone here was a returning GTA, we wrote down our successes, failures, considerations for improvement, as well as particular ideas for interacting with disengaged students, assignments, and any other concerns about this upcoming semester. Over the course of the last semester, I am so thankful to be able to exchange lesson plans, vent, and share successes with the other GTA’s, and I expect this semester to be no different!

Also, after what feels like forever of hyping it up in these academic sections, I finally had a chat with one of my professors for guidance about Ph.D.s. To start out, higher education is a shrinking market, but he thought that a special focus on Ph. D.s that can be applied to fields outside of academia is the way to go. A project like mine, one focused on wine knowledge, expertise, and taste development, has application to the wine field but also to any consumer products, and could warrant further study. He also told me to look at Applied programs, such as Applied Anthropology and Sociology, as they would emphasize the interdisciplinary components, while also considering how to apply work to fields outside of academic spaces. I’ve been exploring it this week, and it could be a good fit.

The only other highlight (if you could call it that) is getting reacclimated to Canvas as a Learning Management System. I painstakingly had to recreate Canvas pages for the two classes that I am teaching, and I made sure to finish it during the weekend, because, as a student, I know how much I would like the Canvas site up before class starts so I can scope out the upcoming semester and see if I have any friends in my classes.

Angry Chickz, a California-based Nashville Hot Chicken chain that prominently features a “dabbing” chicken mascot (remember when “dabbing” was cool?), has begun a bit of a national expansion. Whether that was the primary reason I scored a free “medium”-spicy chicken slider from them or not, that was how I was going to start this week’s day trip! 

As I ate, I was thinking about the past few weeks and how, for each day trip, my meals have all been from medium-sized chains in the process of a national expansion. My immediate reaction to this, I was a bit disappointed. Out of all the places that I could go, I ended up in chain restaurants you could find elsewhere. I wouldn’t ever write about a meal at McDonald’s in this newsletter, but was this the same thing at an albeit smaller scale?

These meals began to feel less like distinctive experiences, but then I began to think back on my previous newsletter entries. Littered throughout the newsletters are moments and meals at chains. There’s the time I stopped at Waffle House for a late-night bite after an all-day flight to Alabama (🎂Cake Duty 7/13/25), ate at In-N-Out for the first time since moving to California, a move that would have astounded younger me who practically made it a required stop on every visit (🏙️ A Tale of Two Conferences 3/8/26), or acquired mounds of free food as birthday gifts from chains (🐷Pig Roast 11/09/25). All of these moments, while mundane, speak to something that I want to share. Maybe chains aren’t an immediate evil to this newsletter. Maybe they are moments to explore regional identities and cuisines. Maybe they allow us to see what is prioritized and becomes of regional and national importance. Maybe these moments also affect my perception of how I interact with the world around me. These places have a story to tell. Something new and discoverable by yours truly.

After finishing up my meal, I started my journey into the City for a special look at something else seemingly mundane: the inaugural Walking Tour of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) led by BART’s General Manager. Over the course of the tour, we were going to explore Powell Street, Glen Park, and San Bruno Station. While I’ve been to Powell Street Station before, I have never been to Glen Park or San Bruno, and the only experience I have of the two is turning to Rylee and singing “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” as we pass it.

As we arrived, I immediately found my 69 fellow tour-goers congregating right outside the Powell Street fare gates. I grabbed my walkie-talkie/headset combo and tuned into the conversation covering several of the improvements being made to each station. As BART was getting close to half a century old, calls arose in 2015 to start modernizing the stations. Even now, at 53 years old, BART is constantly being upgraded, and this tour acted as a place to highlight all of those changes while emphasizing its history.

At Powell Street, which, according to the General Manager, is the most frequent station for tourists visiting San Francisco, they have greenlit a new regional mapping project for consistent signage across their network, completed a public transit canopy project for improved street-level visibility, and installed new trash cans on the platforms to ensure clean, litter-free stations.

At Glen Park, the only BART Station to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was designed by Brutalist designer Ernest Born. It features slate walls, marble floors, and geometric designs that allow natural light to permeate an otherwise underground station. We also learned about the fare gate modernization project and potential plans to change the current automated voices, George and Gracie (the voices for BART Cars going toward and away from the heart of the system, where almost all lines intersect and split off, known as the Oakland Wye).

At San Bruno, the GM emphasized the importance of partnership, saying that nothing gets done at BART without them. We learned of how they partnered with the Tanforan Assembly Center Memorial Committee and a local artist to honor the 8,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated where the San Bruno BART currently stands. We learned of the $12 million glow-up project for San Mateo County Stations from San Bruno’s Mayor. We also learned of BART’s partnership with natural species from Hyde, one of the many birds used to keep pigeons away from outdoor stations. As someone who has had his party pooped on at a BART station, I thoroughly endorse this.

At the end of the day, BART connects communities and takes people where they want to go. The GM said that all of these upgrades are meant to do just that by improving on-time performance, safety, and cleanliness. If anything, this experience further speaks to the importance of the mundane. How do we get around without signage that we don’t think twice about? How do BART stations remain clean without strategically installing trash cans? All of these projects are happening right in front of us, yet I have never given a thought about them in my day-to-day life. However, they make a world of difference in our perception of an experience. 

This past Friday was the SFSU Communication Studies Graduate potluck, and the second I walked onto campus for the first time in over three months, an overwhelming sense of Déjà vu flooded over me. It’s hard to believe that it was just one year ago that I attended this event wistfully optimistic, yet slightly apprehensive about what my time at SFSU had in store (😴 I Dreamed Big... 8/24/25). I remember asking lots of questions to both professors and students alike, and trying to meet as many people as possible. It was everyone’s advice that gave me the initial courage I needed to jumpstart my master’s program. 

As I walked into the room today with an assortment of plane flight snacks as my contribution to the potluck, though, I saw not professors and colleagues, but mentors and friends. I also saw new incoming students, hopefully future friends too. 

As I chatted with people I knew, I ran into the interesting challenge of answering, “How was your summer?” I mean, how do I summarize what an insanely bombastic, eventful summer I’ve had? It felt like a question that I needed a graduate degree in Communication to answer. I relied heavily on my gelato-eating competition (🍦A Ge-Lot of Food... 7/12/26).

Yet chatting with incoming students opened my eyes to how much has truly changed. I realized that I am no longer the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed first-year student that I once was. Don’t get me wrong: I still have lots of questions, but they have evolved past logistical questions about the Comm department and fishing for morale boosters into questions about what the future holds. I know campus, I know how seminars work, and I’ve written extensive papers about communication studies at this point. So, just as the professors and second-year students were eager to help me out, I noticed that I was providing the same level of enthusiasm in helping the first-year students succeed. It was a bellwether moment. Something that one paper might not seem that important, but shows just how far I’ve come.

Originally, Judith and I planned a graduate social directly after, but Ticketmaster instituted some awfully draconian ticket transfer policies to fight resellers, so I had to skip out on it. I want to shout out Judith for holding down the fort as my co-organizer of the event. 

For my next stop, I was off to Oracle Park, not for a baseball game, though. Instead, I was going to The Noah Kahan Great Divide Tour. For some context, Noah Kahan is one of Rylee’s favorite musicians. She first saw him 9 years ago, in front of a crowd of at max 80 people. Fast forward all of these years, though, and Noah Kahan has never been more popular, completely selling out the 40,000+ seats available for his Oracle Park debut. There is something special about knowing about a band before it got popular, so when the tickets became available, she immediately grabbed two, one for her and one for me. 

That being said, my Noah knowledge is very limited. I know some of the songs, but I have a disagreement with Rylee about his song Stick Season. I am a staunch proponent that the chorus starts with, “I love your mom, but it’s the season of the sticks”, yet Rylee assures me that it’s, “I love Vermont, but it’s the season of the sticks”. I’m pretty sure she is wrong, though. Regardless, I am so incredibly fortunate that I have an amazing girlfriend who wants to take me to events such as these.

As I commuted into the city, my public transit ride became swarmed with Noah Kahan fans because there’s something distinctively folky to how a Noah Kahan fan dresses for the concert. It can simply be summarized by one fan asking another couple hopping on my train, “Y’all going to the concert? I clocked you from a mile away”.

We arrived with just the right amount of time to hit the merchandise stand before making it to our seats. At the merch booth, I opted not to get the “I’m crying thanks to Noah Kahan” tissues (a rookie mistake in hindsight). We arrived at our seats just in time for the opener Anabella Dinda, an indie folk musician with songs like “The Hand”. Then came Gigi Perez, whose music leaned more towards indie folk rock with songs like “Fable”.

The crowd immediately hushed as Noah got on and sang songs that made me weep from his lyricism and melodies. At the beginning of the concert, we were given mysterious white blocks on a wristband, but it wasn’t until he started playing that we learned that they were synchronized lights, flickering like fireflies in the night sky. The set design included a rustic house whose roof started to levitate halfway into the concert, a subtle nod to the fact that Noah’s performance was raising the roof. And the ginormous screen in the background projected videos and images of his home state of Maine.  Plain and simple, it was a spectacle. 

As Noah got back up to sing “Stick Season”, I was ready to sing the lyrics I thought I knew, near and dear to my heart, but as the chorus arrived, I became entranced by the collective effervescence of the crowd chanting, “I love Vermont”. I recognize now that I am wrong, and that it’s not “I love your mom”, but rather a beautiful love letter to places that are near and dear to our hearts. 

With it still being Rylee’s birth month and the start of a new semester, we had two great reasons to celebrate. Knowing us, what better way to celebrate than to go wine tasting? Instead of normal romps around Napa, though, we decided to mix it up a bit. Our first stop was all the way in Sebastopol.

Dutton-Goldfield Winery is owned by a fifth-generation farmer, yet its grapes weren’t always its crop of choice. Before vines blanketed the valley floor of the Russian River Valley AVA, the cool coastal climate and fog made apples the king crop of the area. Yet, by the 70’s and 80’s, apple agricultural production moved increasingly to Washington, hurting the market in this region³. Thankfully, the environment that was excellent for apple growing also proved sublime for chardonnay and pinot noir varietals that could not tolerate the heat of Napa Valley.

We tried 7 different wines while at Dutton-Goldfield, mostly composed of chardonnays and pinots, each showing excellent typicity (a new oenology term I learned from our wine educator, meaning how well a wine displays the characteristics of a specific grape varietal and place of origin). I was particularly blown away by a chardonnay that utilized 100% malolactic fermentation, yet somehow didn’t retain any butter on the palate. 

We grabbed a quick brunch in downtown Sebastopol, at a place called Fern Bar, where I munched down on a frittata with toma cheese, summer squash, potatoes, and field greens. And like their plant-inspired name, they did not hold back on the veggies. That frittata was packed full of them! Being so full of nutrients after my meal, we were ready for the next tasting!

While at Dutton-Goldfield’s tasting room, it wasn’t evidently obvious that it was the harvest season, yet as we drove through the vines to get to Balletto Vineyards, our second tasting, it was clear to see all the beautiful, fully grown grapes that were ready to be turned into something even more beautiful. Similar to Dutton-Goldfield, Balletto is owned by a 3rd generation farming family, yet different in that the Ballettos sell most of the grapes they produce, keeping just a minimal amount to produce their own wine. 

As we walked into the outdoor tasting terrace, we were greeted by live music and taken to our table, where I met a succulent also named William Willis. What a coincidence! We tasted 5 wines, all chardonnays and pinots, and we did two side-by-side tastings of each varietal, allowing us to pick up on the subtleties of grapes grown in slightly different vineyards and with slightly different winemaking processes. One thing that became obvious throughout the tasting here was the constant mention of how these same grapes are being sold by bigger companies for 2-5x the cost of what you would find here. While the wine educator at Dutton-Goldfield also mentioned something along those lines, it was a much more common theme here. I wonder if it’s just at these wineries, or if it speaks to something larger about how they entice customers to buy and try wines from Sebastopol and the grander Russian River Valley AVA. I guess we will have to come back to this region again to find out…

One of Rylee’s and my favorite gluten-free influencers is Phil Hates Gluten. He posts frequently about the best gluten-free restaurants and new grocery store products that are gluten-free. What I didn’t know until recently is that Phil Hates Gluten also has a Booktube channel called Phil Got Books. Here is the video where we found out. Wow, A man of many talents!