Hi everyone!

I wrote a birthday card to Tyler Bolo, and my one piece of joking advice was to start your own newsletter. To my surprise, though, the mad lad actually did it! Tyler told me he took inspiration from some of the elements in my newsletter, but reading it, I felt that it took on its own tone. As I read through it, I feasted my eyes on photos of Wafu Italian cuisine (something I have never heard of, but now feel like I need to try it), tried wrapping my head around K-Clustering Algorithms, and unlocked a new party idea: moustache-themed. I also appreciated the shout-out!

All of our lives are made up of the people, places, and experiences around us. Reading through Tyler Talk reaffirms my belief in the power of intentionally reflecting and sharing our lives as meaningful ways to explore and learn about the places around us, while offering points of connection in our world that at times can feel isolating and insular. We each are tinkering with new ideas and exposing ourselves to new concepts, yet we get the opportunity to come back together at the end of the week to share what we have both learned. There’s something joyous to know that while I was out at a tech conference in LA, Tyler was throwing a birthday party in DC. We have two people writing a newsletter now. Who’s next in the Experiential Literary Universe? (I am workshopping the name, and am open to suggestions)

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

In the class that I am teaching, we are still going strong with the Informative PSA Speech Videos. In class, we covered main body paragraphs, researching evidence and examples, and going over mediated presentations. One important part of research is the evaluation of sources. In the age of AI and a distributed media landscape, the ability to properly evaluate sources is of paramount importance. In my research for frameworks for assessing the credibility of sources, I came across a tool called the CRAAP Test (very aptly named in my opinion, haha). It was created by librarians at CSU Chico, and asks students to examine sources based on five criteria: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. I do not know if I was ever given a framework as such, and while I have been doing this source evaluation shindig for quite some time now, I appreciate the simplicity of an acronym like this. 

Additionally, we looked at delivering mediated (digital) speeches, where I emphasized the importance of things like audio, camera placement, and backgrounds. The last thing an audience wants is to listen to someone use a microphone from the 1950’s while posted up in front of a garbage can (unless maybe if you were talking specifically about improvements made from old technology, or perhaps a video about trash and overconsumption). 

In gender studies, I learned about the scavenger methodology, a feminist research approach that gathers information from a variety of unconventional sources, rejecting the notion of strict academic disciplines. This framing, popularized by Jack Halberstam, highlights the scavenged amalgamation of disparate sources, including archival fragments, community stories, informal observations, and everyday encounters, not as things to write off, but rather as meaningful knowledge. This methodology seems to naturally build upon last week’s concept of homing, or the act of deliberate storytelling, but it also makes me think about my newsletter. In some ways, the weekly reflections of my life are quite similar to the scavenging of the world around us, looking at information and perspectives outside of a traditional academic setting. Seeing these concepts play out in our class has me toying with the idea of writing my final paper in the class about my newsletters. We will see though…

In my methods class, we talked about the importance of reflexivity, or the process of examining our own individual beliefs, biases, and actions, in our research. The end goal is to better understand how our unique position informs our knowledge construction and social interactions. I have briefly mentioned reflexivity before in some of my previous newsletters, but the practice runs throughout each step of a critical approach. When applied to interviewing, it means paying attention to how our ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies may compete with our interviewees, respecting interviewees as meaningful sources of information, and tailoring interviews to the interviewees you are talking to. Through these acts of intentional reflection, we can enhance the validity, reduce bias, and minimize blind spots in research.

To finish off the week, I joined our mid-semester Graduate Teaching Associate Check-In Meeting. We talked about how our classes have been going and aired some of our worries and questions. While I have been known to be a worrywart, one thing that has been troubling me the most for the past 8 weeks is grading. I don’t like assigning letter grades to assignments. I think about my undergrad experience, getting obsessed with the idea of achieving an “A”, and putting a gigantic portion of my self-worth into what my grade was. I also recognize how scary it can be to have to get up in front of an audience to speak, as social anxiety took up whatever self-worth I did not place into my grade. I would not want to give a student a bad grade who dared to get up to speak, and have that leave them with a lack of confidence about their ability to speak. After some discussion,  I am going to try more targeted rubrics and to continue to set expectations with students while I break down the rubrics in class. I can hope that this more in-depth approach will help me grade, but also help students recognize areas to improve in without marring their self-confidence in speaking. 

I don’t think I mentioned this already, but I got back home from Orlando until 4 AM Monday. Apparently, storms ravaged the Southeast this past Sunday, so we ended up with a 5-hour delay. I am just thankful we made it back at all, because while we were on the Tarmac, the pilot told us that planes were starting to “time out” and be forced to return to the gate. Endless to say, I was exhausted, and going to school with no meal prep. Fortunately, during my doom scroll sesh on the way to school, the Instagram gods heard my struggles.

One of the local bakeries, Tartine Manufactory, had partnered up with the autonomous vehicle company Zoox. If you downloaded the Zoox app and joined the waitlist, they would give you a free morning bun (which I guess I had never had before, as it was this part-croissant, part-cinnamon-roll concoction) and coffee, which became my lunch/dinner for the day. The morning bun was slightly stale, as it was decidedly not morning anymore, but the sugar and coffee were just the rush I needed to get through the day. Ah, the linner of champions! 

I have never ridden in an autonomous car, and do not plan to anytime soon, but heck yeah, I’ll get some free food from a place I have never been to before. And, on the plus side, Tartine Manufactory was this trendy bakery, restaurant, wine bar, and retail space, which is an offshoot of the original Tartine Bakery located downtown.

On Saturday, to celebrate the start of Spring Break, Rylee and I went out to get drinks with some of my fellow graduate students. 8 weeks down, only 7 more to go after Spring Break!

Our first stop of the night was Smuggler’s Cove, a 3-story tiki bar that goes all in on the tiki theming. I have always said that if you are going to do a tiki bar, you’d better full send it. I don’t want some half-baked tiki bar; I want to feel immersed in the experience. I can 100% get behind this establishment. I got a Dr. Barca’s Fluffy Banana, a mix of cachaça (which is not rum but rather its own legally distinct spirit, made of sugarcane juice rather than molasses), coconut, banana liquor, lemon juice, and bitters. It’s an odd name, but it approximates what I would assume a fluffy banana would taste like, strongly banana-y with a cold foam on top, so who am I to judge? Funnily enough, the originator of the drink is Dane Barca, who has a doctorate in 19th-century English Literature.

I had never heard of cachaça before, but it is not a rum. Rum is made from molasses. Instead, cachaça is its own legally distinct spirit with geographical indication status in Brazil (similar to how champagne can only be produced in the Champagne region of France), made from sugarcane juice. This led me to rhum agricole, which is also a spirit made of sugarcane juice rather than molasses, so if you ever see rhum on a menu, it is not a funny misspelling, but rather its own unique spirit.

We did not want the party to end, so we moved to the BIRBA wine bar a couple of blocks down the street. I am going to be honest with y’all, that I did not get a great grasp on the place as I barely stepped inside the bar. We found ourselves posted up at a table on the street patio, but I think that goes to show that good company and drinks can make any place a great time. And just to confirm, the company and wine were good! I was particularly impressed with a white pétillant with a distinct Meyer lemon note. 

It’s official! Oakland was named by Condé Nast Traveller as the Best Food City in the US for the second year in a row, which makes sense because the food is the thing I miss the most about leaving Oakland. This week was Oakland Restaurant Week 2026 (ORW), which meant a lot of the places had special tasting menus, and it was a great excuse to get a meal in Oakland. Tyler Bolo also happened to be in town visiting some of his friends, so that was another excuse to get a meal at the midpoint between SF and Walnut Creek. Peter also joined us for the meal.

We decided on Parche, a Colombian restaurant, with a three-course meal: a drink, appetizer, and entree. The meal was freaking phenomenal, packed with bold, explosive flavors! I got a Tart N’ Tropical (pineapple juice, coconut water, and guanábana), Bruselas El Prado (cinnamon cardamon fried brussels sprouts), and a steak sando (sliced NY strip steak, costilla negra sauce, and shaved asparagus and carrots)! After the meal, we went back to Walnut Creek to play the card game Hanabi (a cooperative card game where you are firework coordinators trying not to cause explosions, which felt ironic after a meal full of them). I can’t wait to hear about our adventure in Tyler Talk!

I am always curious opening up those Guinness Book of World Records and looking at all of the absurd things you can break a world record in. This video interviews the winner of the world’s fastest talker back in the 1980’s. This man, John Moschitta Jr., held the record at 586 words per minute, before losing his crown to Steve Woodmore in 1990 with 637 words per minute. Apparently, there was some beef between the two, which ultimately resulted in a fast-speaking contest on Good Morning America.