Hi Everyone!
The Food Day conspiracy gets deeper and deeper! In addition to National [Insert Food Here] Days, I found out that there is also National [Insert Food Here] Lovers Day. This week featured National Popcorn Lovers Day (this past Friday), but I specifically remember being advertised Cinemark’s $5 bring-your-own-bucket deal in celebration of National Popcorn Day (January 19th). This trend of having separate national days and national lovers days shows up for multiple foods like bacon (December 30th vs August 20th), cheese (June 4th vs January 20th), and Peanut Butter (January 24th vs March 1st), to name a few. Unfortunately, my research on this topic has led me to conclude that these unofficial holidays are, in fact, creations of companies, marketing, and PR agencies rather than specific phenomena in the world around us, which is so sad. I was really hoping there was some long, drawn-out history with the Peanut Butter Lovers ultimately reigning triumphantly over the Peanut Butter Haters. Oh well!
Now, let’s find out What’s Up With Will…
In my gender studies class, I wrote my first paper of the semester in dialogue with the reading for the week, otherwise known as a paper share. The paper was on a set of readings focusing on homing, which is the act of deliberate storytelling to build community and tackle hegemonic narratives around us. While the work itself took on an Asian American gender studies perspective, I used this work as a way to examine how the stories I tell about the world around me, specifically the stories that I tell in my newsletters. There is nothing quite as empowering to continue with a Ph.D. than citing your own work in an academic piece.
I was completely aloof when signing up for this week, as the actual author of the work guest lectured in class. I was worried for the entire time leading up to the class that they would tear my paper apart, academically speaking. Thankfully, though, I dodged a bullet as the professor hopped off before my paper share. While they didn’t critique my paper, our class did get to ask the author questions on the readings and hear their process for writing. They started the Zoom call by referring to their journey of becoming a professor as their supervillain origin story(something that I am definitely going to start adopting), but one piece of advice that particularly stood out to me was to find out “what is it that you don’t have the words to say, and then write it”.
In our methods class, we briefly talked about redefining methods and research as a form of slow scholarship, in line with the slow culture movement, which advocates for slowing down the pace of human life. You are probably most familiar with the Slow Food movement, which is why your one entree sometimes takes three hours to arrive after ordering. Slow scholarship rejects the speed of academic culture and favors reflection, depth, care, and relationality in your research. It’s a useful idea, especially with our fast-paced lives. It can offer a space for deliberate inquiry, and a reminder to stop and smell the roses. We also covered defining and analyzing notable moments of the interviews we conducted last week. Notable moments are short sections of an interview that stand out for any reason, ranging from things that you find surprising, confusing, emotionally charged, or even something you want to understand better. Highlighting these notable moments can help kickstart the preliminary analysis.
In the class that I am teaching, we are starting an informative video speech assignment. You might be asking, why a video? Well, one of the core student learning objectives is to make technology-enhanced presentations, and videos definitely fit this bill!
We are in a mad dash to complete this by the end of Spring Break (which is a week away). I have decided to scaffold this project, which allows students to take things step by step, as well as providing in-class time to finish most of the speech in class rather than forcing them to do it entirely outside of class. Hopefully, scaffolding will help students procrastinate a bit less, but you and I both know that that’s not always the case for school assignments.
In class, we covered what an informative Speech is, brainstorming, introductions, conclusions, transitions, and outlines. I tried to focus on a Social Justice topic for my class examples (since that is what the Informative Speech will be on), but the students did not find much enjoyment in it, so we pivoted to exploring an informative speech about parking at San Francisco State University.
You might remember a year ago when Brent, Lexie, and Sterling visited us in San Francisco for a Spring Break-esque trip. This year, we decided to keep up the tradition, but this time visit Sterling in Melbourne, Florida!
Melbourne, Florida, is located about an hour and a half southeast of Orlando on the “Space Coast”, 72 miles of coastlines full of space and aerospace companies in addition to the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. When deciding what we would get up to while there, Sterling informed us that Melbourne goes all out for Saint Patrick’s Day, known as Irish Fest. I think we all were a little bit shocked, but it turns out 13% of Melbourne’s population is Irish, which is higher than Florida’s Irish population (8.9%).
We flew in overnight on Wednesday and met up with Brent and Lexie in Orlando before Sterling came to pick us up for the drive to Melbourne.
Upon our arrival in Melbourne, we ate at Meg O’Malleys, the Irish Pub in the area, and host of Irish Fest. I would describe Meg O’Malley’s as the most stereotypical Irish Pub possible, but I say that in the best stereotypical way. That night, Johnny Mac and the Irish Luck band were playing Irish bangers (no mash, though), while a Magician named David Kelly walked around making bagels appear out of nowhere. While I love a good bagel, Meg O’Malley’s should start coordinating with the Magician to make our meals magically appear!
I ordered Shepard’s Pie, consisting of crispy colcannon, beef stew, and veggies. They also served Irish Parliament Bean Soup, supposedly the same recipe served in the Irish parliament for 18 cents. It was surprisingly served for 18 cents too! That will probably go down in history as the cheapest item I have ever ordered in a restaurant!
Later that night, we went to Sterling’s favorite wine Bar in the area, Dolly’s. The vibes were quaint, cool, and cultured, and you’re never going to believe this, but it was a natural wine bar! I have only ever seen one of these in the Bay Area. I ended up sipping on a pét-nat from Uruguay while playing a round of Uno (Lexie won).
The next day, we woke up slightly less sleep-deprived, but still in need of coffee. We walked through Downtown Melbourne as vendors were setting up for Saturday’s event, and we could tell that this was no rinky-dink operation.
We finally got to Villon Coffee Company, home of the Banana Latte. I opted for a Banana Foster latte, as it would be a shame to miss out on the home of the banana latte. Unsurprisingly, it tasted like a banana, but what caught me off guard was that they used something called banana milk to get that flavor. A new milk has entered the chat. Do you think they feed the cows bananas to make the milk taste like that?
Then we went to the beach, because we were in Florida after all, and it would have been a travesty not to at least get some fun in the sun. We headed to Paradise Beach, though, I guess in this case, Paradise felt an awful lot like a California beach. The water was freezing. It just confirms that California is paradise.
I legitimately tried giving it the good old college try multiple times by wading in the water, but it was just too freaking cold. Eventually, I resigned to sitting on the beach and reading.
The next morning, kickstarted Irish Fest. We began by watching the 36th Annual Downtown Melbourne Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. We saw many cars, bands, and floats celebrate Irish heritage, family, and community with marching bands, colorful floats, dancers, and organizations from across Brevard County.
Then came Irish Fest itself. Sterling informed us that nearly 20 of his friends had confirmed they would be there, which tracked with the scale of things. Downtown Melbourne’s Main Street was completely shut down and transformed into a full-on street fair. Live music filled the air, vendors lined the streets, and beer was everywhere. The entire street was packed to the brim with green. Some of the shirts people wore kept it simple with the classic, “lucky”, but some got a bit creative, like “Irish you were Beer”.
At the end of a really packed day, Sterling had one last plan for us: a drag show at The Twister Rooster, featuring his favorite Queen, Twila Holiday. It sounded like a great way to end the night!
All was going well until we entered the bar and immediately noticed that every single person was wearing pink shirts, except us, draped in green. We then noticed that there was no stage, performers, or any signs of a drag show. We paused to make sense of things for a second, then Brent went up to one of the nearby women and asked what was going on that night. She said it was an “LS Event”. Still not quite clicking, he pressed a little further on what “LS” meant, and she simply stated it meant “Lifestyle”. He came back to us a little confused, and that’s when we put the pieces together that we didn’t walk into a drag show. We had accidentally stumbled into a swingers’ event.
Experiencing my first swingers event was definitely not on my radar for this trip.
There is sometimes extravagance in planning a trip that gets you away from everything familiar. At the same time, our homes are inexplicably linked to who we are. They are the places that we build with intentionality, little by little. What made this trip especially great was getting a glimpse of the life that Sterling had he had created for himself. We got to see the city he calls home, try out all his favorite restaurants and bars, and meet all his newfound friends. It is a reminder that just as Rylee and I have been building our life in California, he has been building an awesome life here too!
On the trip, Brent showed me one of his recent favorite videos. I am kind of obsessed with this video now!
