This page is a work in progress. It’s here for me to come back and add to every once in a while, when I’m in a reflective mood.
Miscellaneous Bits
- I was born in Riverside, CA, where I lived until I graduated high school. Riverside is great! It’s equidistant from the beach, the mountains, and the desert—so one could theoretically surf, snowboard, and ride dirtbikes all in the same day. I know people who’ve done this so they can say they have.
- My family is from Winnipeg, Manitoba (going back to the 1700s), and although I am a California boy, it occurred to me at some point in my childhood that I am quite Canadian. By the letter of the law I am “first-generation American,” but my family’s home country just happens to be Canada, which is almost America.
- I grew up in the hills, where I developed a lasting taste for frequent saunters in nature. I also grew up camping, fishing, and occasionally hunting. I long for the ability to do some of these things more often.
- I played baseball for most of my childhood, and I was not bad. (My dad was better.) I actively root for the Dodgers, and usually end up watching most of the games every season, or at least having them on in the background.
- I swam and played water polo in high school. I might still hold one or two swimming records—though less because I was so good and more because my high school was historically not so good.
- My favorite video game growing up was RuneScape, which I got to experience, up close, from the transition to RuneScape 2, the Falador Massacre (I actually knew the guy who did that), the introduction of the Grand Exchange (which was a crash course in basic economics), and through the elimination of the Wilderness. Like many, at this point I stopped playing. In 2020 I started chipping away at a new RuneScape 3 account, which is still active, although I have lately not had much time to play.
Animals
Most everyone I knew growing up had dogs and cats. My family had four dogs: Tyson, Prancer, Kaydo, and Jake. All good boys!
As a young boy, I would sit for hours and hours in the backyard with Tyson, who was really a special dog. We believed he was an Australian shepherd or cattle dog. To me he always seemed wise and noble unlike anyone I knew, and offered great comfort whenever I needed it. I can’t really overstate how much time I spent with him. His was the first death that really affected me. I remember not being able to sleep for days just thinking about it. But when the day came, I was just ready, I think because I saw that he was ready.
After Tyson died, we got Jake—a Rhodesian ridgeback/labrador mix—who was really my dog until I moved away to college. I trained him myself, and he ended up being a really good dog. This, I suppose, was my first confrontation with the fact that I’m pretty good with dogs.
After moving to San Francisco, the first dogs I really had close contact with were Isabelle Peschard’s first two, first Charley and then Leo. When I was TAing for her logic classes, I would sometimes walk them while she lectured, or else just hang out with them in her office. As she got more and more into walking dogs at the local shelters, fostering dogs, and eventually adopting several more, I was conscripted.
Through Isabelle, and just through walking dogs all over the East Bay (a lot), I met many people who were in need of various dog-related services—walking, boarding, animal sitting, and training. Gradually, I accepted more little dog jobs, and over time this became a significant side business. By 2022, I was making just as much money working with dogs as I was as a PhD student, and I was even being recruited by a big local trainer who had much more business than she could keep up with.
Alas! life intervenes—and by 2023 I decided to focus on academics. I adopted two of Isabelle’s foster kittens, Merlin and Dayha, who each have their own ways of impeding my academic progress.
Noteworthy Teachers
Bas van Fraassen
By now I have considered Bas a friend for more than a decade. I first met him in his advanced and philosophical logic classes at SFSU, around the time I was TAing for Isabelle’s logic classes. Like a good undergraduate philosophy student, I took excessive advantage of his office hours each week. Gradually, this grew into a great friendship—indeed, one of my most cherished. To this day, each week, we walk his dog Zoe together. I’ve known her just about as long as he has. She’s a meaty pit bull with no eyes, is practically deaf, and is gradually losing control over her legs.
Obviously I can say much about Bas, but in lieu of that, over time I will populate this list with some of his greater witticisms:
- “In order to have something to say about modalities in nature, as so many do, I should have to first accept that there are modalities in nature. I never got that far.”
Steven Tainer
After taking Bas’ logic courses, and independently developing an interest in contemplative practice, I found the old website for the Kira Institute, a Summer program at Princeton, of which Bas was a founding member. One of the other founding members, Steven Tainer, happened to teach weekly classes on Eastern contemplative practices in Berkeley, so I decided to start attending. Steven intrigued me because he began his career as a philosophy student, with interests in logic and analytic philosophy, but ended up becoming an advanced Buddhist teacher instead. His classes ended up occupying a major part of two years of my life, from 2014–2016.
What I especially appreciated about Steven’s teachings was that although they were primarily Buddhist (or Eastern), and indeed very advanced, he appears to care much less about the jargon and whatnot than the transmission of the actual methods and contents of contemplative practice, to anyone who is ready to receive it, and at any level. So often in spiritual teachings, progress is impeded by the desire to be spiritual, or the desire to make spiritual progress, and people end up getting ahead of themselves, e.g., in jargon, or in posture, etc. There was none of this with Steven. I cannot speak highly enough about Steven. Although lately I am busier elsewhere in my life, my thoughts return to his teachings quite frequently.
George Leonard
Jacob Needleman
- “The best gift you can give to a giver is to receive their gift.”
- “It is impossible not to love somebody in the moment that they are struggling for the truth.”
Substitute Teaching
Here will be the tale of two years of substitute teaching.