July 13th is Embrace Your Geekness Day. According to HolidayInsights.com, this holiday was created and copyrighted by Wellcat Holidays, who proclaimed that “You’re a geek,…
Geeking Out with Jeffrey Harlan
Category: Essays
Comic books have slowly been introducing more LGBT+ representation into their four-color worlds. They’ve come a long way from questionable depictions of queer characters, to modern comics that feature LGBT+ couples in (relatively) stable, loving relationships. Here’s a quick look at a few of those characters.
There are many examples of fathers in comics and science fiction, and that parent-child relationship has provided a wide array of stories. Notable among those…
A Year of Disasters The year was dominated by a global pandemic, but that was not the only disaster that faced us. The year opened…
World News
The year started on a high note, with the unveiling of the first bionic hand capable of a sense of touch outside of a laboratory environment in Rome on January 3rd. Just ten days later, however, a false alarm sent out to cellular phones over the emergency alert network about an incoming missile attack in Hawaii caused widespread panic. A month later, a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, left seventeen dead, but inspired several of the surviving students to become national leaders in their fight to prevent such tragedies from recurring. Also in February, the U.S. Olympic team brought home twenty-three medals.
At the end of October, I had to make an incredibly difficult decision. I had to quit my job. It was, unfortunately, not the best fit for me, and I was beginning to feel the negative impact from that throughout my life. My work performance was suffering, I was falling behind in my classes, and I was spending such long hours at work and in school that I hardly spent any time at all at home with my wife. When I left the job, I was assured that I would be given a different position, one in which I had done well for more than ten years before switching to my last job.
It’s been nearly six weeks. None of that came to pass. For the first time since before I enlisted in the military nearly twenty years ago, I find myself unemployed. I’ve been searching for a new job with little success. I spend most of my waking hours each day scouring employment web sites and forums. Numerous leads have looked promising, only to fail to pan out.
My transition from military to civilian life was difficult, and even after more than eight years, it still seems to be a work in progress. I was fortunate to have a job lined up and waiting for me when I separated from the Air Force; an old friend from my pre-enlistment college days was working as a teacher, and knowing that I was going to need a job while I went back to college, helped me to secure a position as an instructional assistant for special education.
With as much reading and writing as I do, it’s perhaps more than a bit ironic that my blog is as woefully neglected as it has been. The past year has been nothing if not filled with major changes in my life, so it’s not as if I’ve lacked for topics about which to reflect.
Veterans Day means a lot to me. Coming from a family with a long and rich military heritage, serving our nation, both in wartime and in peacetime, is deeply ingrained in my family’s character.