THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

"I bet you'd drop ten strokes if you golfed more," my father said on a windy early evening last week just outside of Gaylord. We were playing the back nine of the Gaylord Golf Club, driving up to the tee boxes on the 17th hole. I was having my usual experience of up-and-down play -- mostly down, to be honest -- but I thought about what he said and decided to engage in a little experiment: That next week, I would golf nine holes at least once every day during the week to see if I could get the average to drop. And so I did. If there's one positive to having seven online classes, it's that you can schedule your time for golf pretty easily. And after grading for hours each day in the early morning -- Monday was the worst, with just over an hour's worth of grading for each class, eyestrain and neck cramps be damned -- you really want to hit a little ball as far as you can over and over, so it was 9-hole therapy at its finest. With a few texts and Facebook messages...

  A couple days ago, I decided to swing by the Roscommon campus of Kirtland Community College, one of the 28 public community colleges in Michigan, to check out my old stomping grounds. Like many people who grew up in or near Roscommon, I have some significant personal history with KCC, an outpost of higher learning nestled in the thick jack pine woods, triangulated between Roscommon and Grayling and St. Helen as a rural oasis of academic possibilities. Thanks largely to my step-father Tom Dale, a KCC professor for three decades, I attended classes at KCC for three semesters when it was clear that I wasn't emotionally or financially developed enough to attend Michigan State University, giving me a jump into my time at Central Michigan University. And starting as a 25-year-old Master's student, I taught Intro Psych at KCC from the summer of '96 to the spring of '98, so I wouldn't have my job at North Central Michigan College were it not for my time at KCC. My memorie...

  If I'm asked what I'm thinking about at the moment, it's some variation on the fact that the cult leader never leaves the cult on his own volition. Let me give you some context. It's hard to bitch about experiencing sub-clinical agitated depression when you firmly understand how blessed you truly are when compared to the people around you. After all, when I start talking about why I'm feeling down or out of sorts, I start boring myself almost instantly, so I can only imagine how people on the receiving end of the communication must feel. How fortunate am I? My job has changed, but I still have a job. My housing situation has changed, but I have a stable home. I'm less than two months away from turning 50, but I can say that each birthday is halfway to death and it's a statement more positive with each year. I can do frivolous things like golfing and buying CD's and drinking funky flavors of Mountain Dew straight from the lab and not have to instantly w...