Cinemorphosis

Category: Education in the AI Age

  • When the Cloud Crashes and Humanity Briefly Reboots

    When the Cloud Crashes and Humanity Briefly Reboots

    Amazon Web Services crashed this morning, dragging half the digital universe down with it. Canvas, my college’s sacred “learning management system,” is among the casualties. I have a class in an hour. No panic, though. I can still hand out a physical sheet of paper—what the ancients called attendance—and my Google Slides are miraculously alive. So yes, the show will go on.

    Still, I can’t help savoring the schadenfreude of this AWS outage. What if it took social media down with it? Imagine: no more performative friendships, no more dopamine duels in the comment sections, no more algorithmic outrage masquerading as civic discourse. Maybe we’d start talking to each other again—face to face, like mammals. Maybe we’d even regain the human capacity for silence.

    Of course, this is delusional optimism on my part. Civilization won’t reboot itself because a few data centers hiccuped. I need to quit romanticizing the apocalypse and focus on my real challenge: surviving two hours with a roomful of chatty college athletes while explaining “emotional depth” and “mapping components.”

    Wish me luck. My Canvas may be dead, but my dry-erase marker still lives.

  • We’ve Reached the Era of College Video Essays

    We’ve Reached the Era of College Video Essays

    It’s becoming increasingly clear that many students can use AI tools to produce polished essays that reveal little about their actual thinking or engagement with the topic. At this point, I’d rather assess a twelve-minute YouTube-style video essay in which the student presents their argument naturally, without relying on a teleprompter. I’m still open to scaffolded writing assignments along the way—such as the introduction and claim, counterarguments, and rebuttals—but the final product should be the video itself.

    I’m convinced that presenting a video essay will be a superior learning experience for students and a superior tool for measuring Student Learning Outcomes.

    I wonder how far off my department is from having a discussion about replacing conventional essays with these video presentations.

  • What My Online Students Think of Online Education

    What My Online Students Think of Online Education

    In my Canvas discussions, I asked my online students to compare digital learning with face-to-face classes, focusing on engagement. Their responses revealed a consistent theme: engagement is welcome only when it feels meaningful. They don’t mind interacting if the instructor gives them authentic, purposeful tasks—not the mechanical grind of busywork disguised as “participation.” 

    Several admitted that the steady stream of Canvas notifications feels like digital nagging, while others said they’ve grown fluent in navigating the platform. 

    Many praised the control and solitude of online courses, saying they prefer working alone to enduring the awkward silences, small talk, and clock-watching of in-person classes.

    A number of students described their lives as an intricate juggling act—full-time jobs, parenting, long commutes—and called online education “a lifeline.” Without it, they said, college simply wouldn’t be possible. 

    What I took from these exchanges is that my students crave efficiency and purpose. They want online courses that are streamlined, clearly organized, and free from filler. They appreciate the focus that comes with studying privately, without the distractions and logistics of campus life.

    While pass rates in online courses can be up to fifteen percent lower than in-person ones, that statistic misses the larger truth: online education isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity. For many working adults and parents, it’s not just another mode of learning; it’s the only door still open.

  • Will Online Education Expose the Class Divide?

    Will Online Education Expose the Class Divide?

    I began teaching online composition in March 2020, when the world suddenly went remote. Like everyone else, I adapted out of necessity, not preference. Since then, I’ve taught both online and face-to-face courses, and the contrast has been eye-opening. I never realized how physically demanding in-person teaching was until I experienced the frictionless ease of the online classroom. Behind the Canvas wall, I am a disembodied voice, orchestrating discussion like the Wizard of Oz. In person, I am on stage—reacting, performing, fielding energy and questions in real time. It is exhilarating and exhausting, proof that teaching in the flesh demands more than intellect; it requires stamina.

    Today, I discussed this with a friend and colleague nearing seventy, a man who has been teaching full-time for nearly forty years. Despite the fatigue of in-person instruction, he refuses to teach online. His reasoning is both moral and practical. He doesn’t like the lower pass and retention rates of online classes, but his deeper concern is social. “The more we move online,” he told me, “the worse the class divide gets. Only rich students will take face-to-face classes and get a real education. Poor students—working long hours and pinching gas money—will settle for online. Don’t you see, McMahon? It’s an equity issue.”

    He had a point. “So what you’re saying,” I replied, “is that the wealthy can afford genuine engagement—real classrooms, real conversation—while online education offers a simulation of that experience for everyone else.” I paused, thinking about my own students. “But it’s not just an equity issue,” I added. “It’s an engagement issue. We talk endlessly about ‘student engagement’ in online learning, but that word is often misplaced. Many students choose online classes precisely to disengage. They’re working parents, caretakers, exhausted employees. They don’t want a full immersion—they want survival. They want the credential, not the communion.”

    Later that morning, I brought this conversation to my freshman composition class. When I asked if they wanted “student engagement” in their online courses, they laughed. “Hell no,” one said. “It’s like traffic school—you just get through it.” Another, a bright fire science major, confessed that after eight weeks of an online class, she’d learned “absolutely nothing.” Their expectations were low, and they knew it. Online education, for them, was not a journey of discovery but an obstacle course—something endured, not experienced. Still, as someone who teaches writing online, I can’t accept that entirely. I want my courses to be navigable and meaningful—to raise enduring questions that linger beyond the semester. Like Dorothy on the yellow brick road, I want students to follow a clear path, one step at a time, until they reach their own version of Oz. And while I know online learning will never replicate the immediacy of face-to-face teaching, I don’t think it should. Each has its own logic, its own measure of success. Forcing one to imitate the other would only flatten them both.

  • AI—Superpower for Learning or NPC Machine?

    AI—Superpower for Learning or NPC Machine?

    Essay Assignment:

    Background

    Students describe AI as a superpower for speed and convenience that leaves them with glossy, identical prose—clean, correct, and strangely vacant. Many say it “talks a lot without saying much,” flattens tone into AI-speak, and numbs them with sameness. The more they rely on it, the less they think; laziness becomes a habit, creativity atrophies, and personal voice is lost and replaced by AI-speak. Summaries replace books, notes replace listening, and polished drafts replace real inquiry. The result feels dehumanizing: work that reads like it was written by everyone and no one.

    Students also report a degradation in their education. Higher learning has become boring. Speed, making deadlines, and convenience are its key features, and the AI arms race pushes reluctant students to use AI just to keep pace. 

    The temptation to use AI because all the other students are using it rises with fatigue—copy-paste now, promise depth later—and “later” never arrives. Some call this “cognitive debt”: quick wins today, poorer thinking tomorrow. 

    Some students confess that using AI makes them feel like Non Player Characters in a video game. They’re not growing in their education. They have succumbed to apathy and cynicism as far as their education is concerned. 

    Other students admit that AI has stolen their attention and afflicted them with cognitive debt. Cognitive debt is the mental deficit we accumulate when we let technology do too much of our thinking for us. Like financial debt, it begins as a convenience—offloading memory, calculation, navigation, or decision-making to apps and algorithms—but over time it exacts interest in the form of diminished focus, weakened recall, and blunted problem-solving. Cognitive debt describes the gradual outsourcing of core mental functions—attention, critical reasoning, and creativity—to digital systems that promise efficiency but erode self-reliance. The result is a paradox: as our tools grow “smarter,” we grow more dependent on them to compensate for the very skills they dull. In short, cognitive debt is the quiet cost of convenience: each time we let technology think for us, we lose a little of our capacity to think for ourselves. 

    Yet the picture isn’t purely bleak. Several students say AI can be a lifeline: a steady partner for collaborating, brainstorming, organizing, or language support—especially for non-native speakers—when it’s used as a tutor rather than a ghostwriter. 

    When used deliberately rather than passively, AI writing tools can sharpen critical thinking and creativity by acting as intellectual sparring partners. They generate ideas, perspectives, and counterarguments that challenge students to clarify their own reasoning instead of settling for first thoughts. Rather than accepting the AI’s output, discerning writers critique, refine, and reshape AI writing tools—an exercise in metacognition that strengthens their analytical muscles. The process becomes less about outsourcing thought and more about editing thought—transforming AI from a shortcut into a mirror that reflects the quality, logic, and originality of one’s own mind.

    When used correctly, AI jump-starts drafts and levels the playing field; leaned on heavily, it erases voice, short-circuits struggle, and replaces learning with mindless convenience

    Question You Are Addressing in Your Essay

    But can AI be used effectively, or does our interaction with it, like any other product in the attention economy, reveal that it is designed to sink its talons into us and colonize our brains so that we become less like people with self-agency and more like Non Player Characters whose free will has been taken over by the machines? 

    Writing Prompt

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay that answers the above question. Be sure to have a counterargument and rebuttal section. Use four credible sources to support your claim. 

    Suggested Outline

    Paragraph 1: Write a 300-word personal reflection about the way you or someone you know uses AI effectively. Show how the person’s engagement with AI resulted in sharper critical thinking and creativity. Give a specific example of the project that revealed this process. 

    Paragraph 2: Write a 300-word personal reflection about the way you or someone you know abuses AI in a way that trades critical thinking with convenience.  How has AI changed the brain and the person’s approach to education? Write a detailed narrative that dramatizes these changes. 

    Paragraph 3: Write a thesis with 4 mapping components that will point to the topics in your supporting paragraphs.  

    Paragraphs 4-7: Your supporting paragraphs.

    Paragraphs 8 and 9: Your counterargument and rebuttal paragraphs.

    Paragraph 10: Your conclusion, a dramatic restatement of your thesis or a reiteration of a striking image you created in your introduction. 

    Your final page: MLA Works Cited with a minimum of 4 sources. 

  • 30 Student Responses to the Question “What Effect Does Using AI Have on Us?”

    30 Student Responses to the Question “What Effect Does Using AI Have on Us?”

    Prompt:

    Begin your essay with a 400-word personal reflection. This can be about your own experience or that of someone you interview. Focus on how using AI writing tools—like ChatGPT—has changed your habits when it comes to thinking, writing, or getting work done.

    From there, explore the deeper implications of relying on this technology. What happens when AI makes everything faster and easier? Does that convenience come at a cost? Reflect on the way AI can lull us into mental passivity—how it tempts us to hand over the hard work of thinking in exchange for quick results.

    Ask yourself: What kind of writing does AI actually produce? What are its strengths? Where does it fall short? And more importantly, what effect does using AI have on us? Does it sharpen our thinking, or make us more dependent? Do we risk becoming less original, less engaged—more like passive consumers of technology than active creators? As this process continues, are we becoming Non-Player Characters instead of humans with self-agency? Explain. 

    Finally, consider the trade-offs. Are we gaining a tool, or giving something up? Are we turning into characters in a Black Mirror episode—so enamored with convenience that we forget what it means to do the work ourselves? Use concrete examples and honest reflection to dig into the tension between human effort and technological assistance.

    Student Responses to Using AI tools for writing and education:

    1. “I am impressed with the speed and convenience but the final product is overly polished and hollow.”
    2. “I am amazed by the speed of production but all the sentences look the same. Honestly, it’s numbing after a while.”
    3. “The writing is frustrating because it talks a lot without saying much.”
    4. “I don’t have to think as much,” “I save time not having to think” and “I get used to this laziness.”
    5.  “AI writes better than I do, but it doesn’t have my unique voice.”
    6. “AI is like a steady writing partner, always there to help me and bounce off ideas, but lately I realize the more I depend on it, the less I challenge myself to think critically.”
    7. “Thanks to AI, I stopped reading books. Now I just get summaries of books. Now I get the information, but I no longer have a deep understanding.”
    8. “AI helps me take notes and organize ideas but it doesn’t help me truly listen, understand someone’s emotions, show empathy, or deal with uncertainty.”
    9. “AI writing is smooth and structured, but people aren’t. Real thought and emotions are messy. That’s where growth happens.”
    10. “When I’m tired, AI tempts me to just copy and paste it, and the more I use it in this manner, the stronger the temptation becomes.”
    11. “AI makes things really easy for me, but then I ask myself, ‘Am I really learning?’”
    12. “What started out as magical now has become woven into the fabric of daily life. Education has become boring.”
    13. “AI is a production superpower the way it inspires and organizes ideas, but I find over time I become more lazy, less creative, and rely on AI way too much.”
    14. “AI degrades the way we write and think. I can tell when something is written in AI-speak, without real human tone, and the whole experience is dehumanizing.”
    15. “I love AI because it saved me. I am not a native English speaker, so I rely on AI to help with my English. It’s like having a reliable tutor always by my side. But over time, I have become lazy and don’t have the same critical thinking I used to have. I see myself turning into an NPC.”
    16. “I have to use AI because the other students are using it. I should have the same advantages they have. But education has become less creative and more boring. It’s all about ease and convenience now.”
    17. “I used to love AI because it made me confident and motivated me to get my assignments in on my time. But over time, I lost my voice. Now everything is written with an AI voice.”
    18. “The more I use AI, the less I think things through on my own. I cut off my own thinking and just ask ChatGPT. It’s fast, but it kills creativity.”
    19. “When faced with a writing assignment and a blank mind, I would start things with ChatGPT, and it got things going. It wasn’t perfect, but I had something to start with, and I found this comforting. But as I got more confident with ChatGPT, I became less and less engaged with the education process. My default became convenience and nothing more.”
    20. “AI writing is so common, we don’t even ask if the writing is real anymore. No one cares. AI has made us all apathetic. We are NPCs in a video game.”
    21. “AI is a great tool because it helps everyone regardless of how much money we have, but it kills creativity and individuality. We’ve lost the pleasure of education. AI has become a mirror of our own superficial existence.”
    22. “When I first discovered AI to do my writing, I felt I had hit the jackpot, but then after taking so many shortcuts, I lost the love for what I was doing.”
    23. “It’s stressful to see a cursor blinking on a blank page, but thanks to AI, I can get something off and running quickly. The problem is that the words are clean and correct, but also generic. There is no depth to human emotion.”
    24. “I’ve been using AI since high school. A lot of its writing is useless. It doesn’t make sense. It’s inaccurate. It’s poorly written. It’s dehumanizing.”
    25. “AI is basically Google on steroids. I used to dread writing, but AI has pushed me to get my work done. The writing is polished but too perfect to be human writing. The biggest danger is that humans become too reliant on it.”
    26. “I barely use AI. It makes school trivial. It’s just another social media disease like TikTok, these streaming platforms that kill our attention spans and turn us into zombies.”
    27. “AI first felt like having the cheat code to get through school. But then I realized it puts us into a cognitive debt. We lose our tenacity and critical thinking.”
    28. “I am a mother and an avid reader, and I absolutely refuse to use AI for any purpose. AI can’t replace real writing, reading, or journaling. AI is a desecration of education and personal growth.”
    29. At first, I used AI to get ideas, but over time I realized I was no longer thinking. I wasn’t struggling to come up with what I really thought or what I really wanted to argue about. AI silenced who I really was.”
    30. “Using AI to do the heavy lifting doesn’t sit right with me, so I programmed my AI to tutor and guide me through studying, rather than using it as a crutch by providing prompts and tools to help me understand assignments.While my experience with AI has shown me its full capabilities, I’ve also learned that too much of it can ruin the entire experience, in this case, the learning experience.”
  • The Engagement Meter Hits 10 with my AI Writing Assignment

    The Engagement Meter Hits 10 with my AI Writing Assignment

    Every semester, I pull out my Engagement Meter and see what topics make my students’ neurons fire. This term, in freshman composition (C1000), the essays on “bro influencers manipulating young men” and “fast fashion manipulating young women” barely twitched the needle—a flat 3 on the Engagement Scale. Things improved when we compared Frederick Douglass’s memoir with the “Sunken Place” in Get Out, which jumped to a 7.

    In my critical thinking class (C1001), we hit an 8 when students explored how GLP-1 weight-loss drugs prove that self-control is no longer a moral virtue but a technical setting. They saw that biology and convenience have replaced grit and willpower.

    But the assignment that detonated the Engagement Meter—a clean, seismic 10—was the essay on AI. Students wrote about how AI tools make life easier while quietly siphoning their agency, originality, and voice. They confessed that “helpful” algorithms were making them sound polished but hollow, frictionless but forgettable.

    I call these scaffolded assignments “building blocks.” After seven years of teaching them, I’ve never seen such intensity. The AI essays weren’t just reflections; they were confessions—students realizing that technology isn’t merely reshaping their writing but their sense of self.

    The irony? The more they wrote about AI replacing them, the more human they sounded.

  • The Temu-ization of Everything—Again

    The Temu-ization of Everything—Again

    I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s freshly minted Enshittification. Early on, he revisits Facebook circa 2010: the honey pot that lured billions before curdling into a slurry of compulsion loops, conspiracy gristle, and industrial-scale data mining. It’s sharp, it’s punchy—and it gave me déjà vu. Then my stomach dropped: I like the coinage, I like the thesis that we’re living through the Enshittocene, but the insights feel old. Jaron Lanier mapped a lot of this terrain eight years ago in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I’ve taught over the last seven years.

    Doctorow’s Amazon chapter triggers the same shrug. The platform seduces us with convenience, tightens its talons, and gradually morphs from glossy marketplace into Temu-adjacent bazaar. True, and thoroughly litigated across a thousand essays and think pieces. We’ve been warned about the house always winning; we don’t need another tour of the casino floor.

    What I wanted—and didn’t get—was a deeper dive into the anthropology of the rot. Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” or “Joan Is Awful” doesn’t just wag a finger at platforms; it autopsies the psyche and the systems. New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka nails the gap: Enshittification is “pointed and efficient,” but reads like “professional blogging extended for three-hundred-plus pages,” leaving you hungry for a larger cultural x-ray that goes beyond the usual suspects.

    To be fair, packaging a messy discourse into one memorable term matters; not everyone read Lanier or binged Brooker. Doctorow’s snark has its uses. A clean label can move an idea from seminar rooms to dinner tables. But once you’ve named the disease, the next move isn’t to repeat symptoms; it’s to map vectors, power centers, and countermeasures with fresh cases outside the Big Tech pentagon.

    So yes: I love the word. But the book left me underwhelmed. Doctorow has given us the bumper sticker; I’m still waiting for the field manual. The Enshittocene doesn’t need another catalog of platform sins—it needs a blueprint that shows how to break the flywheels, where policy and design can bite, and why our appetites keep refilling the trough. Name the era, sure. Now show us how to survive it—and, if we’re lucky, how to end it.

  • The Eight Ages of –ification

    The Eight Ages of –ification

    From Conformification to Enshittification: how every decade found a fresh way to ruin itself.

    The Age of Decline, Accelerated

    In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow argues that our decline isn’t gradual—it’s accelerating. Everything is turning to crap simultaneously, like civilization performing a synchronized swan dive into the sewer.

    The book’s subtitle, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, suggests that degradation is now both universal and, somehow, fixable.

    Doctorow isn’t the first prophet to glimpse the digital abyss. Jaron Lanier, Jonathan Haidt, and other cultural Cassandras have long warned about the stupidification that comes from living inside the algorithmic aquarium. We swim in the same recycled sludge of dopamine and outrage, growing ever duller while congratulating ourselves on being “connected.”

    This numbness—the ethical anesthesia of the online age—makes us tolerate more crappiness from our corporate overlords. As the platforms enshittify, we invent our own little coping rituals. Some of us chant words with –ion suffixes as if they were incantations, linguistic ASMR to soothe our digital despair.

    When I saw Ozempic and ChatGPT promising frictionless perfection—weight loss without effort, prose without struggle—I coined Ozempification: the blissful surrender of self-agency to the cult of convenience.

    Now there’s an entire liturgy of –ifications, each describing a new layer of rot:

    • Enshittification — Doctorow’s coinage for the systematic decay of platforms that once worked.
    • Crapification / Encrappification — The transformation of quality into garbage in the name of efficiency.
    • Gamification — Turning life into a perpetual contest of meaningless points and dopamine rewards.
    • Attentionification — Reducing every act of expression to a plea for clicks.
    • Misinformationfication — When truth becomes a casualty of virality.
    • Ozempification — Replacing effort with optimization until we resemble our own avatars.
    • Stupidification — The great numbing: scrolling ourselves into idiocy while our neurons beg for mercy.

    But the crown jewel of this lexicon remains Enshittification—Doctorow’s diagnosis so precise that the American Dialect Society crowned it Word of the Year for 2023.

    Still, I’d like to push back on Doctorow’s suggestion that our current malaise is unique. Yes, technology accelerates decay, but each era has had its own pathology—its signature form of cultural rot. We’ve been creatively self-destructing for decades.

    So, let’s place Enshittification in historical context. Behold The Eight Ages of –ification: a timeline of civilization’s greatest hits in decline.

    1950s — Conformification

    The age of white fences and beige minds. America sold sameness as safety. Individuality was ironed flat, and television became the nation’s priest. Conformification is the fantasy that security comes from imitation—a tranquilized suburbia of identical dreams in identical ranch homes.

    1960s — Psychedelification

    When rebellion became transcendence through chemistry. Psychedelification was the belief that consciousness expansion could topple empires, if only the colors were bright enough. The result: self-absorption in tie-dye and the illusion that enlightenment could be mass-produced.

    1970s — Lustification

    A Freudian carnival of polyester and pelvic thrusts. From Deep Throat to Studio 54, desire was liberation and the body was both altar and marketplace. Lustification crowned pleasure as the last remaining ideology.

    1980s — Greedification

    When morality was replaced by market share. The decade baptized ambition in champagne and cocaine. Greedification is the conviction that money cleanses sin and that a Rolex can double as a rosary.

    1990s — Ironification

    The decade of smirks. Sincerity was cringe; irony was armor. Ironification made detachment the new intelligence: nothing believed, everything quoted, and feelings outsourced to sarcasm.

    2000s — Digitification

    Humanity uploaded itself. Digitification was the mass migration to the screen—the decade of Facebook envy, email anxiety, and dopamine disguised as connection. We stopped remembering and started refreshing.

    2010s — Influencification

    When everyone became a brand. Influencification turned authenticity into a business model and experience into content. The self became a product to be optimized for engagement.

    2020s — Enshittification

    Doctorow’s masterstroke: the final form of digital decay. Enshittification is what happens when every system optimizes for extraction—when user, worker, and platform all drown in the same algorithmic tar pit. It’s the exhaustion of meaning itself, disguised as progress.

    Epilogue: The 2030s — Reification

    If trends continue, we’ll soon enter Reification: a desperate attempt to make the unreal feel real again. After decades of filters, feeds, and frictionless fakery, we’ll long for something tangible—until, inevitably, we commodify that too.

    History repeats itself—only this time with better Wi-Fi.

  • Comparison Is the Mother of Misery

    Comparison Is the Mother of Misery

    The mother of misery is comparison. In fourth grade I plunged into despair because I couldn’t draw like Joseph Schidelman, the illustrator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. About the same time, baseball humbled me: my bat speed wasn’t in the same galaxy as Willie Mays, Dick Allen, or Henry Aaron. In my teenage bodybuilding years, I had muscles, but nothing like that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sergio Oliva, and Frank Zane; I wisely retired the fantasy of becoming Mr. Universe and managing a gym in the Bahamas. In college, as an aspiring intellectual, I flogged myself for lacking Vladimir Nabokov’s wit and velocity. My chances of becoming a famous novelist were equal to my odds of winning Mr. Olympia. Later, when I flirted with composing and singing, I heard Jeff Buckley’s soul pour through the speakers and realized my voice would mainly trigger a neighborhood dog-barking contest and a chorus of angry neighbors. Decades passed. My classroom persona faced a generation handcuffed to smartphones and ChatGPT. I scrambled for “edutainment” tricks to dodge irrelevance, but the gap widened no matter how I danced.

    The sting doubled when I watched Earthquake (Nathaniel Stroman) flatten an audience with a preacher’s cadence and bulletproof wisdom. His special Joke Telling Business left me muttering, “If I had Earthquake’s power, I could resuscitate my teaching career and stroll into old age with a shred of dignity.”

    Meanwhile, fresh incompetencies arrived like junk mail. I broke two Samsung TVs in one day. I failed to sync my new garage door opener to my phone. My wife had to rescue me from my own maladroit tech spiral. The result was predictable: I was condemned to the Shame Dungeon.

    Down in the basement of depression, I noticed another casualty: my YouTube channel. I usually post once a week and have for over a decade—mostly about my obsession with diver watches. But as sanity demanded I stop flipping watches, I ran out of new divers to discuss. I tried pivoting—open with a little watch talk, then segue to a wry misadventure with a morsel of human insight. If I nailed the landing, I’d get a few thousand views and enough comment energy to believe the enterprise mattered.

    But with my sixty-fourth birthday closing in, the doubts got loud. I don’t want to do “watch talk,” and I’m too mortified to perform a perky, self-deprecating monologue about my misalignment with the universe.

    I keep hearing Mike Birbiglia in my head: you must process your material before you present it; the set has to be a gift, not your live catharsis. The healing happens before you step onstage. You speak from the far shore, not mid-drowning. Otherwise, you’re asking the audience to be your therapist.

    So I’m stuck at a fork: Will this current fear and anxiety about age and disconnection pass through the refinery of my psyche and emerge as something worthy? Or will I remain in the Shame Dungeon, comparing myself to Earthquake, and decide that with talent like his prowling the earth, my best move is to hide under a rock?

    Here’s the dilemma plain: Hiding isn’t viable; it starves the soul. But serving the world a plate of unprocessed mediocrity is just as unforgivable. If I’m going to tell a story about breaking two TVs and my garage-opener meltdown, I have to deliver it with Earthquake’s power and confidence. Otherwise I’ll stay home, mope on the couch, and binge crime documentaries—losing myself in bigger, cleaner tragedies than my own.