Rocco Versaci's Blog, page 6

Stuff I Saw

As I continue to work on the final revisions to Queasy Rider, I'm also thinking about how I'm going to assemble the different narrative pieces. Most of the book consists of long chapters that "cross cut" between my experiences on the road and various memories, but there are also shorter chapters that will pop up from time to time, like the "FAQ" writings that I've posted here.

And then there are the comics. My plan is to sprinkle throughout the book several different comics--a couple of multi-...

#soccerdad

As far as entertainment goes, it’s tough to beat people watching. It’s free, easy, and you can do it just about anywhere. Sure, some places are more rewarding than others—the airport, Las Vegas, Black Friday sales—because you can always count on the fact that at any moment someone will do something completely devoid of common sense, self-consciousness, or even a rudimentary understanding of basic civil conduct. For my money, though, there's somewhere that tops them all.
The sidelines of any k...

FAQ Check, Part Deux: Godfather Time

Here is another question that I've been asked about my cross-country bike ride: "Did You Get Bored out There?"

And here's my answer:

Sometimes.

Biking for six, seven, even eight or nine hours a day—often on seldom-traveled roads in wide-open landscapes—I had to invent ways to keep myself entertained and distracted.

For instance, I’d make up little stories about the things I saw on the side of the road.

A water bottle filled with cloudy yellow liquid became a trucker’s emergency bathroom, filled wh...

On a Positive Note...

I feel like I need to offer a little bit of balance to some earlier posts—including the last one—about the state of today’s college students. Yes, it’s fun to focus on problems (like not bringing books, paper, or even a pencil to class), and yes, it’s much easier to entertain with these little anecdotes than with the feel-good stuff, but it’s also important to give credit where it’s due, and the truth is that I have encountered some incredibly motivated and talented students over the last fif...

Power

A few weeks ago in one of my classes, we were discussing what is perhaps the greatest piece of argumentation ever written, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Our focus on appeals, structure, and imagery eventually gave way to a conversation about larger issues of inequalities in our society, the nature of protest, and empowerment.
Teaching at a community college, I see these issues—especially the last one—as central to my students’ lives. For the most part, my students f...

No Easy Rider

A vivid memory from my cross-country bike ride (yes, it's an excerpt from the book):
It was getting late on my fourth day out, and I’d stopped at a gas station called “Wheelie’s 76” in Palo Verde, California.  I’d just inhaled a S’mores-flavored energy bar, a Milky Way, a banana nut muffin the size of my fist, a pint of chocolate milk, and a one-liter bottle of fruit punch Gatorade.  I didn’t know it yet, but some version of this obscene caloric intake was going to become a typi...

Digitize This!

It’s a common scene in today’s college classroom.  The students file into class, the professor begins to discuss that day’s reading, and out come the electronic devices.  The students aren’t being rude, mind you.  Well, maybe that one guy in the back with a laptop is actually checking Facebook or looking for hubcaps on eBay (this has happened before).  But the rest really are looking at their reading, because more and more students engage with the written word as a digital...

FAQ Check

When people find out that I rode my bike across the country, they ask me lots of questions. I've noticed that the same ones keep coming up, so in what I hope will be a recurring type of blog post, I'm going to answer them. Today's question is, "Were you chased by dogs?"

I was in Prescott, Arizona, sitting in a booth wedged into the corner of a Mexican restaurant, a little hole-in-the-wall place that didn't serve alcohol but let you bring in your own. The owners provided some help to the handfu...

Keep Your Eye on the Ball

When my boys were younger, I coached their little league teams. Most of the time running practices and managing games were the highlights of my day, but sometimes--sometimes--the experience of working with squirrelly boys was a teeth-grinding exercise in self-restraint.

It's my considered opinion that baseball is the craziest sport to try to teach kids. First of all, there are the rules, which can be mind-boggling for someone new to the sport (How come I have to tag him? Last time I just had t...

The Sound of One Hand Typing

I was in writing lab the other day, trying to answer my students' questions about their graded papers, which I'd just handed back. These questions were fairly typical: "What should I do in my introduction?" "What do you mean by 'more details'?" "What's this word you wrote here?"

Eventually, they hunched over their keyboards and got to work on their revisions. While they wrote, I tuned in to the sounds of the room. Shuffling papers. Mumbled conversation. The drone of the air conditioning. A sta...