Doyle's Blog

So it was February of 1991, and I was in Chicago, debating at the Northwestern tournament, and something unexpected happened. We were debati...

Every few years I lose almost everything I own. I moved from Georgia to Arizona in 1997, from Arizona to Texas in 1999, and from Texas to Or...

So one of the things I get to do with my three months of vacation is work on my academic research. College professors try to write and publi...

Okay. Apparently a big ol' segment of the human race needs a review of the flippin' obvious. The sidewalk is for two-way traffic. T...

In the first place, I feel fully dressed in my T-shirt and boxers. My boxers are very definitely old-person undergarments; they're loose...

Over the past forty-eight hours, I fought my battle with coffee. It was over a lot sooner than I expected. All the same, I doubt I'll to...

For the most part, I love being a teacher, and I can't imagine doing anything else for a living. There's just one part of the job th...

I dodge cyclists. I do this by walking on the extreme edge of the sidewalk. Cyclists have this thing about blazing straight up the middle. I...

For this one, I need help, in the form of comments, from my fellow Oregonians. I'm not taking a big out-of-town trip this summer. For on...

Fun is not the point. Fun is a by-product. There's a difference between instrumental goals and terminal goals. I don't arrive at wor...

A comely looking bunch. Bye, folks.

I wouldn't want to be the person assigned to pick thank-you gifts for academics. That seems to me like a bug of a job. From time to time...

I've never liked my name. And I do mean never. I distinctly remember disliking it when I was in Kindergarten, and announcing to my mothe...

So, every now and then I get to daydreaming about synaesthesia. There's a kink in my brain wiring that may qualify as an example, but I...

Q: What do you call two days of rain in Eugene? A: A weekend.

"You kiss your mother with that mouth?" "My mother's dead." "Oh. Well. Better wipe your mouth after, then....

Someone just apprised me of the local saying: "We don't tan; we rust." Nice.

That's an unfortunate name for a blog entry, what with the Nazi death camp connotations and all, but it was the best I could come up wit...

Monday nights I take Japanese lessons. This past Monday, we reviewed numbers between ten and a hundred. I'd learned them before, but I h...

I think I'm pregnant. I know this is far-fetched, me not having a womb, ovaries, that kind of thing. But I'm having alliterative cra...

On Sunday, we were blessed with five inches of snow. Overnight we had a fresh layer of an inch or so, and we've had the occasional flurr...

"You're really onto something. Either that, or you're really on something." My colleague Kendal, who teaches math and phys...

This morning, for the first time, I walked to work in the snow. I think I missed out, growing up, on how much joy can come from the presence...

The idea that we feel broken up into pieces that are claimed by different obligations in our lives is not original with me. Part of me belon...