Coming back to The Perennial Student after so many years of not adding to it (despite it being on my browser home tabs page), it dawns on me that the last time I really engaged with the blog was FIVE years ago. At that time, I had been home only a couple of months after having traveled to New Orleans for an academic conference: the 2020 Conference for the International Society for the Study of Narrative (https://www.thenarrativesociety.org). At that time, we were only just learning about the extent of the COVID pandemic; in fact, I am not sure the word ‘pandemic’ had yet been used to describe it. But it was clear, while traveling through New Orleans, Houston, and El Paso to get home to Las Cruces, that something terrible was happening. And it was also abundantly clear that we were living in a political nightmare: Trump was POTUS and he was mismanaging the spread of a highly contagious and deadly respiratory disease. The airports I passed through getting home were eventually identified as ‘hot spots’ for the spread of the disease. I was lucky … I neither caught it nor brought it home with me.

At the time I made the post about the conference, we were in a form of social lockdown designed to prevent the spread of the disease.

Now, in 2025, we are once again dealing with a Trump ‘presidency’ … a whole new nightmare, about which I might write some other day. This is important because when – it is not a question of ‘if’ or ‘whether’ – the next pandemic strikes (could it be measles, as with the cases at the border area among New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico?) we will be dealing not only with a ‘president’ who routinely deals in dis-/mis-information, we will also be dealing with Robert F. Kennedy , Jr., as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. I believe that is all that need be said. His name is synonymous with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.

So, as I said in the title of this post, we have awakened from one nightmare (Trump 1.0), and after a four year period of relative sanity and recovery, find ourselves back in the nightmare (Trump 2.0).

This post serves as an introduction to yet another attempt to re-awaken this blog and use it to think through things that catch my attention.

One of those things, only just noted, is that I misspelled ‘perennial’ in my domain name. Thankfully, I spelled it correctly in the site ‘name’. What was I thinking?!? Or, was this a compromise because the domain name I wanted, spelled correctly, was already taken? That sounds like a good cover story …