I recently finished reading How to Disagree Better” by Dr. Julia Minson.¹ While I would like to think of myself as an absolutely unstoppable disagreeing machine (I dare you to start an argument with me), much of the book focuses not on how to win arguments, but on how to foster better disagreements that open the door to future discussions.

We all tend to engage in what Dr. Minson refers to as naive realism, or the view that everyone believes that they are right in their views in some fundamental way. Therefore, the thesis focuses on developing receptiveness, or a person’s willingness to consider opposing views impartially. Not only can you find out what your receptiveness score is in the link below² (I got a 4.8 out of 7, meaning I’m slightly more receptive than the average person), but you can also practice it by following the H.E.A.R. framework:

So, to answer the question Rylee posited at the beginning of this intro, I don't believe she is “cooked”. If anything, I’ve learned that it might be better to engage in a productive dialogue than to win in a scorched-earth, guns-a-blazin’ strategy. Although I’m pretty sure I already knew that that wasn’t an effective strategy.

Now let’s find out What’s Up With Will…

Week 2 has me feeling like I’m already in the thick of things. While its been some fun and games (like a much needed weekday MTG Commander session with Karlie and Seb), its also been me constantly grading, reading, studying, and attending classes.

Last year, I was only teaching one class, so I didn’t have anything to compare it to. Because I am teaching two, it has been fascinating to see how lessons, activities, and discussions go with the video. I have been psychometrically analyzing these discrepancies, trying to figure out why certain things excel, and others fizzle in both classes. I was explaining that to my critical pedagogy professor, who told me that overanalyzing things is counterproductive at best, and a lot of times, it can simply boil down to when the class is. Students might still be sleepy in the morning classes, compared to later in the day classes where students might be more awake. That being said, I know that I was nocturnal at one point my freshman year, so maybe there’s no use speculating. I should just go with the flow as best as possible. 

Since this is the start of the academic year, I figured it would be prudent to do a campus tour of our beautiful SFSU campus in the public speaking class I teach, led by one of the official campus tour guides. It’s also one of our core learning outcomes to include an assignment regarding campus life, and I believe I have already talked about my yearning for field trips in school (❤️ Will I Am Your Valentine! 2/15/26). So, this essentially hits two birds with one stone. 

Little did I know, though, that as soon as I walked into the campus tour office to check in, the campus tour coordinator walked out of the office to greet me and tell me what a great idea this campus tour was for students. Then, our guide let me know as we were walking outside that, to his knowledge, this was the first-ever campus tour for current students. For once in my life, I had a completely original idea then: allowing undergraduate students to acclimate themselves to campus. Wow! 

It always shocks me how little I know about things that I feel so certain about. As we walked around campus, we walked past familiar buildings, but also places that I have never once set foot in since starting at SFSU. I learned about a cadaver lab for nursing and kinesiology students(Mummies and cadavers? This campus is extra haunted, I guess, 🤔 I Was Disoriented 8/17/25), an observatory that’s apparently discovered exoplanets, a map room to pore over centuries of cartography, and an earthquake simulator to test the structural integrity of any object you create in one of many maker spaces on campus. It was also fascinating to learn where each college takes its classes, offering a space to better understand what student life is like for the undergrads in my class. I would be remiss, though, to not shout out the Spider-Man costumed man hollering at us to join his film fraternity. College is such a unique environment;  I hope my students got as much value out of exploring it as I did.

In the study hall class, we looked at the COMM master’s 2-year academic plan, and after looking over my degree plan in class, I can confirm that I am, in fact, on track to graduate next semester (I thought I already was, but as we were reviewing it, doubts appeared in my head, and then were subsequently quashed). That activity, though, really put into perspective how little I have left in this program. For example, within the next few weeks, I have to enroll in my culminating experience, a comprehensive test based on all of the classes that I have taken in my Master’s program. It’s a bit scary to think about in the second week, but I am choosing instead to take up the mantra of one of the first-year students in class: “I’m going to be swag surfing this paper”. 

Still riding the high of knowing more about wine than I thought in last week’s lecture, I was ready to transition into our first wine tasting. In class, we started with a PowerPoint on Oenology, the study of making wine. In addition, considering we were going to be wine tasting, we also learned about the characteristics of wine. Tannins, which determine a wine’s structure and backbone. Fruitiness, the propensity of a wine to display fruitlike aromas and flavors. Balance, an ideal equilibrium so no one characteristic rises above the other, and terroir, the total impact of any given site on the wine. All of these terms, I have heard in conversations from my time in Napa, but to see them printed in a slide deck added a bit of legitimacy to these words that are sometimes breezed through in wine tastings rather than given individualized attention. 

We also paired this PowerPoint with a Modern Marvels episode on how wine is made. As we were watching, it was cool to see discussions of the Judgment of Paris from Chateau Montelena intermixed with unpretentious mass-market wine like Franzia and Two Buck Chuck. While I think the primary goal of the video was to provide a visual depiction of oenology, I think it also showcased the extensiveness of wine, considering the holistic process rather than just the front-facing tasting room, which describes that experience. 

Finally, we moved on to the tasting section of the class. For the tastings, our professor informed us that we would be doing a modified version of the Wine & Spirits Education Trust (WSET) Systematic Approach to Tasting. Sweetness, Acidity, Tannin, Alcohol, Body, Flavor, Intensity, Finish, and Quality. Thankfully, our professor gave us a mnemonic device he created when he was studying for his WSET: Some Animals Take A Breakfast for Flying Far (quality in this case is a variable, not a part of the SAT, but rather his own metric of how much we appreciate a wine).

The professor pulled out two boxes of Bota Box: a Pinot Grigio and an old-vine Zinfandel. He started by pouring the Pinot Grigio, as it’s the lighter of the two, and then we hopped into the tasting. 

To “properly” taste a wine, the professor said, the first step is to use your eyes. You should hold a glass of wine up to a white background to examine its color, opacity, and legs of the wine. For the Pinot Grigio, I noticed a pale yellow; the Zinfandel, a dark ruby.

Then, one must begin to use their nose to smell the wine. After you smell it a first time, you can give the glass a twirl to oxygenate the wine and allow the wine to “wake up” and release other aromas. In the professor’s mind, though, if you smell something, then it’s there, as we all have different tastes and senses we are attuned to. This is a stark contrast to how wine is generally presented, with a specific set of tasting notes that are either present or absent. For the Pinot Grigio, I got a bit of Meyer lemon and stone fruit. For the zinfandel, I noticed cranberry, pepper, and a bit of muskiness. I told this to my professor, and he agreed with me (a big confidence boost for me).

After you have appreciated a wine by seeing it and smelling it, then you can move on to tasting it. His directions were to swish it all around your mouth like you’re using mouthwash to allow the wine to coat your mouth. “It’s not very refined,” he noted. From here, you can use the mnemonic to evaluate a wine based on its palate. For the Pinot Grigio, I noticed the hint of peach before cloyingly acidic (which the rest of the class thought it just had moderate acidity; maybe it’s just an indicator that I have a low acid tolerance in a wine). In the Zinfandel, I noticed a bit of wood that gave it some structure, in addition to the fruits I mentioned on the nose.

While I believe that Bota Box is a solid entry way into wine, I was not a fan of either. Judith, who is taking the class alongside me, told me that Bota means boot in Spanish, to which I responded, “ So like give it the boot”. That said, I thought the old-vine Zinfandel was slightly more up my alley than the Pinot Grigio. I also loved the level of approachability that the teacher brought to the tasting. Despite a relatively structured format of tasting wine, including SATs, vocabulary, and sensory descriptions, it never made wine feel complex and impossible to appreciate in our own ways. I am excited to bring this sensibility to other more “prestigious” wines.

For my interpersonal communication seminar, the current philosophy of the class is focused on positive communication, namely how we interact with, converse with, and communicate with others in a constructive, at best, or at least not destructive way. That being said, the Dark Side of communication has increasingly had a stranglehold over interpersonal communication in the past decades, ever since The Dark Side of Interpersonal Communication was released by Brian H. Spitzberg and William R. Cupach in 1994. That being said, what is the dark side, other than being a Sith Lord? 

Coming into class, we were asked to find an article focusing on the dark side of interpersonal communication, and for me, I found an experimental study exploring variances in speech behavior alongside lying within a board game called “Secret Hitler” that incentivizes players to deceive each other. While this is a playful example of the dark side, in discussing all of our articles, the dark side ranges from deception to jealousy to bullying to aggression to stalking, yet that doesn’t begin to encompass its entirety.

After discussing the dark side, we transitioned briefly into specific behaviors that bring about relationship dissolution, from extensive research completed by a marriage therapist, of all people. John Gottman would hear about negative conversations in therapy sessions, yet he couldn’t watch them firsthand. So, one day, Gottman decided to ask people in romantic relationships to record conversations, many of which included conflict. Over many years, he found 4 behaviors that, if present in conversations, are 90% predictive of a divorce or breakup, which Gottman called “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”. They are non-constructive criticism, contempt or disgust, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Furthermore, Gottman defined a golden ratio of 5 positive communication interactions for every 1 negative for a relationship to work.

LEGO might have been conceived as a kids’ toy, but the truth is that a large number of adults collect and build LEGO. Some recent estimates say that upwards of 15% of its sets are targeted at adults. ⁴There are also conferences, brick-building competitions, and quite an online presence of people who post videos and pictures of their imaginative ideas turned into reality, exclusively with LEGO. They have amassed such a large fandom that they have a name for themselves, too: AFOL, or Adult Fans of LEGO.

I’ve always had a fascination with LEGO. While I’m not the one to go off the instruction manual with a whimsical creation, I do love the zen-like state I enter when I build a new set and the excitement of collecting new minifigures. I’ve always wanted to go to a LEGOLAND, but Disney has always taken precedence, and by the time I learned about LEGOLAND Discovery Centers, kids-only miniature theme parks based in major cities like Atlanta, I was firmly out of the kid demographic. When I received an ad for a LEGOLAND Discovery Center Bay Area Adult Night, I figured I would give it a shot. I grabbed my nicest Hawaiian Shirt in honor of the Luau Night theme and was off to Milpitas.

Upon entering, it was clear that the place was meant for kids: knee-high tables and a playplace that could have barely fit me, cordoned off, and a life-sized LEGO pirate mascot walking around. Yet, finally being able to enter a space meant for kids felt like I was releasing my inner child. I had a blast finagling my way through a Ninjago-themed laser maze set to Sensei level, the hardest possible difficulty. I hopped on the Imagination Express, an interactive shooting theme park ride taking you from the bathroom to outer space to acquire a MacGuffin Map. I also played with LEGOLAND Discovery Center’s very own earthquake simulator. It appears that SFSU ain’t all that…

Through many of these activities, though, I got to interact with the other AFOL at the event, who all shared a love of LEGO. As I walked around a meticulously built miniature diorama of San Francisco, playing a game of Where’s Waldo, I chatted with a family who have been coming for multiple adult nights as a way to hang out together after everyone has grown up. While I built a take-home tropical ornament, I chatted with a fellow Ph.D. hopeful about our fears and frustrations about the upcoming application cycle. As I sat through a 4D movie in the LEGO Theater (LEGO City Officer In Pursuit), all of us in the audience laughed at the peak silent physical comedy. I must say, Charlie Chaplin walked so that LEGO could run. We all got to show our competitive side as we competed in a LIMBO contest. I ended up winning, but I slightly hurt my back in the process, a harsh reminder that I’m truly an AFOL and not a KFOL.

Over the course of the night, they gave you tickets based on what you participated in. At the end of the event, I had 14 tickets I could use to enter a raffle for one of 6 LEGO sets. I debated whether I should spread my tickets across the raffles or enter for one of the smaller sets, as the big ones might get more entries. But then, I figured, why not take one more page from my inner child, channeling that infantile level of unfettered optimism, and decided to go big or go home on the largest set. Thankfully, my gamble paid off, though, as I heard my name. I had won the LEGO Ninjago Ultra Dragon Battle set. 

As I left, I couldn’t help but be overjoyed, finally making this dream of going to LEGOLAND come true. I might have been a bit older than the target demographic, but tonight was just as marvelous as I imagined it.

To wrap up our week, Rylee and I went to see Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie at the Lesher Center. This play was also the start of Center Rep’s 59th season, entitled “Dreamers and Daredevils”, and I would say that Williams’ work definitely fits into this genre. Glass Menagerie is recognized as one of the first memory plays, that being where a lead character narrates the events of the story as they remember it. The story focuses on a brother recounting his sister getting a gentleman caller, while also dealing with his fraught relationship with his mother and his desire to explore rather than be entertained by others doing so through the movies. Through these events, the show also played with memory, using projections of vivid images, neon blue words significant to the dialogue, and music that swelled at the most pivotal moments. When considering our own memories, are we going to remember its totality, or will only certain parts remain, enshrined in neon blue letters and a backing track? 

And before you start wondering, there was a glass menagerie…

On my commute, I started binge-watched this series on YouTube that I have always put off because of how long it is. Also, what’s a better way to spend time on the BART than watching the YouTube competition series: Jet Lag The Game? I really enjoyed it! It’s kind of like the Amazing Race, which was my favorite reality shows growing up, and if we are being honest, is part of the reason for my insatiable wanderlust.