An Interdisciplinary Life: Updates and New Writing

Hello,

It's been a while. It's been three years to be exact. Kind of hard to believe. A lot has happened in three years, and I haven't written about any of it. The truth is, I had basically stopped writing here in the summer of 2022. At that time, my kids were getting older and I reached that stage that many of us parent bloggers reach wen it becomes uncomfortable to write about kids who have increasing agency. When Lou's friends started to find my writing, I knew it was time to take a step back.

Roberto on stage in his PhD robes giving double I Love You signs to his family

I also really, really needed to finish my dissertation. I always knew that blogging was a way for me to avoid my research, while telling myself I was still writing something. Also, the immediate rewards for bogging were much more fun than the ultra delayed gratification of the dissertation. Still, I felt more urgency when my third advisor suddenly quit teaching without explanation. So I set this blog aside and spent the next year fully focused on graduating; which I did. With honors. It was a big moment for my family. That was 2024.

Between then and now, I have wanted to start writing again. I just didn't know what I had to say. I could go back to writing personal essays like I did before I had kids. I could even write about the kids again. I had ideas but nothing ever got me inspired enough to crack open the computer. Then I received an email from our local minor league baseball team, the Oakland Ballers. They were frustrated by the lack of coverage they were getting from local media outlets so they were announcing a partnership with a blog that had been writing about the team for their first two years of existence. The site, Dispatches from Raimondi, is run by Joe Horton, a writing teacher who works at Cal and U.C. Davis. Until this winter, Joe had been pretty much the only one writing for what was his personal blog. The email said that if anyone was interested in cover the Ballers for Dispatches, they should send in an email. So that's what I did.

I knew Joe a little bit as a fellow Ballers fan and I had read some of his posts on Dispatches. He welcomed me to the staff and I started pitching stories. Most of what I'm writing for the site are features and profiles of people associated with the team. They aren't totally sports stories. I like to think of them as human interest stories with a sports backdrop. I'm having a great time with this project. So if you enjoyed my work here, I hope you'll hop on over to Dispatches and check out what I'm doing now. I'll link directly to my articles below.

Thanks,

-Berto