Hello, any readers still left. I’ve taken a bit of a break from my podcast posts, mostly because I left the notebook that contained my notes in North Carolina after my cousin’s wedding, and I didn’t have it in me to reconstruct my thoughts (and I didn’t really want to re-listen to the podcasts and try to remember what I thought) for this round.

My mother kept the notebook for me (thanks, Mom!) and now I have it back, so I’ll jump back into the podcast brackets soon. I do kind of miss the frenzied podcast-listening, and I’m looking forward to jumping back in.

After visiting my family a couple weeks ago, I also realized that I’m not the only one who likes to turn things into a bracket competition. One of my brothers asked another one of my brothers to rank his medical school prospects bracket-style. Yes, apparently my family defaults to brackets and competition when trying to decide between things. I’m ok with that.

On a completely different note, I’ve also been thinking a lot this week, as have many, about the nature of public discourse, protests, violence, and media coverage in the wake of the Charlottesville rally and counter-protests last week. It was surreal to see my town name turn into a negative hashtag and in international headlines. I don’t have a lot of coherent things to say, but the events of last week have been stirring around in my mind, making me reevaluate where I’m spending my time and energy.

It is so easy to reduce one another to the aspects we dislike, the political views we disdain, the feelings we abhor. I don’t want to be reductive, but I also don’t want to stay silent while people who look like me lash out at other people who look different, just because they look different. A human being is a human being, and I want to remember that before every interaction, especially online, where it’s so easy to forget that there’s a living, breathing, feeling person behind every comment.