My Cardboard Balcony

Right now, I am sitting in the living room of my friends Chris and José's condo. It's almost eleven o'clock, on the very first day of 2016. I have been in Southern California for five days and five nights. I have met up with old buddies, revisited some of my favorite eateries, brought out the guitar and mandolin for jamming times, resisted the urge to buy a dulcimer, and cheered in the new year with peach sorbet and champagne. 2015 was, overall, a very good year for me. It was also a busy, crazy, stress-inducing year. I jumped into my student teaching assignment feet first, working with two mentor teachers and over fifty students. I designed unit plans, learning segments, and scaffolding strategies in class. I continued to work at my private school job, teaching classes I never thought I would teach, like economics. I even worked a couple of shifts a week at my bookstore job before I finally requested to be designated as an on-call employee. Through it all, I continued to...

Rules of the Cyborg Apocalypse by Belinda Roddie Bros before robos, dude! Haven't you read anything by Asimov?

Everyone who knew the president on a personal level understood that she was no tyrant; she was simply attempting to maintain order in a society that was crumbling apart like stale bread. Yet the accusations stained the newspapers and magazines on a daily basis: Tyrant, Dictator, Megalomaniac. Yet President Sardonna would not let any of the vitriol get to her when she had a job to do.