#105: Blank Book of Dreams

A week before the start of classes, the WWU Student Bookstore was already abuzz with activity. Warren Woodward University, being an urban school, was a very different campus from Arbor State, which was set off in the remote, bucolic woodlands of Michigan west of Detroit. By this time of year, athletes would have already returned to Ann Arbor, and for the past two weeks been jogging around the Diag like troops of marines, whether male or female. By now, one week before the fall semester, regular students would have already begun moving back into dorms and apartments. State Street would be swarming with freshman and returning upperclassmen hunting for textbooks at Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Book Store, filling the bars and restaurants and movie theaters, and generally looking to get laid.

#104: Postcards from the Edge of Forever

Tuesday was too grey and rainy to think of flying up to Royal Oak in my newly-dry-cleaned Ms. Megaton Man uniform—aside from my general aversion to use my Megapowers for merely everyday tasks. I had just read an article about acid rain and feared it might be the one thing that could undo the indestructible Quarantinium-Quelluminum fabric and my Grandma Seedy’s costuming handiwork.

#103: Call for Papers

The week before school started, I attended an afternoon orientation for grad students in the urban theory and social planning program, after which I got a buttload more textbooks and readings for the recitations I’d be teaching. A recitation, in case you don’t know, is a class connected to one of those big lecture classes taught by a professor for hundreds of students in big lecture hall a couple times a week. Then the teaching assistants, grad students like me, go over or “recite” the material in smaller breakout sessions in regular classrooms on another day for about twenty students at a time.

#102: The Multimensional Pinpointer

It was going to take a while for it to sink in that my eighteen-month-old distant cousin had singlehandedly fended off a battalion of robotic invaders at the Youthful Permutations headquarters in Troy while I had been reading my Introduction to Hypothetics textbook for an upcoming seminar in my off-campus apartment in Detroit ten miles away.