I feel like a terrible person. -_-
Over the summer, we got emails about two professors that died, one of which was a Ph.D student called Stephen Jordon. That name rang a bell in my head because I was in a "Interpretation and Argument" English class about AIDS taught by a great young man called Professor Jordon. I actually recall sitting there, reading the email, and wondering if it was the same Jordon that I knew. I figured it wasn't and then totally forgot about it until today, when we got an email saying "If you're getting this email, it means that you were in Stephen Jordon's AIDS class and that you are being invited to a World's AIDS Day celebration on Dec. 1st. Please attend, Stephen would have been proud."
I... had no idea that my own professor died. How terrible is that? I totally disregarded the email saying that someone had died in a car crash because I didn't know that his first name was Stephen.
The interesting thing about this man was that he said he was living in California in the 80's when the virus showed up and saw a lot of his gay friends die over the years. From his tone, our class figured that he was either gay himself, had the virus, or both. (He never specifically admitted anything.) He was very calm and open about discussing every aspect of the virus but you could tell that he very passionately believed that something should be done about it. I always thought that was really cool. He even mentioned one day that his brother died of a meth overdose, which was shocking to hear because he seemed so nonchalant about it that you just have to wonder how much death this guy has seen.
After reading today's email about World AIDS Day, I'm still wondering if he had AIDS. I don't think the university would have sent out a email about AIDS and mention him simply because he taught one (of many) classes on it, right?
I don't know. :( It still makes me sad. I was definitely welling up in tears when I read the email and realized how very wrong I was to ignore that email from the summer. *sigh* I even remember mentioning to my roommate that "Wow, we've lost so many teachers this year and I don't personally know any of them."
Anyways, my research experiment is getting really bizarre (aka opposite of what we expected) results but I'll spare you guys a long rant about that. What a weird day.
I... had no idea that my own professor died. How terrible is that? I totally disregarded the email saying that someone had died in a car crash because I didn't know that his first name was Stephen.
The interesting thing about this man was that he said he was living in California in the 80's when the virus showed up and saw a lot of his gay friends die over the years. From his tone, our class figured that he was either gay himself, had the virus, or both. (He never specifically admitted anything.) He was very calm and open about discussing every aspect of the virus but you could tell that he very passionately believed that something should be done about it. I always thought that was really cool. He even mentioned one day that his brother died of a meth overdose, which was shocking to hear because he seemed so nonchalant about it that you just have to wonder how much death this guy has seen.
After reading today's email about World AIDS Day, I'm still wondering if he had AIDS. I don't think the university would have sent out a email about AIDS and mention him simply because he taught one (of many) classes on it, right?
I don't know. :( It still makes me sad. I was definitely welling up in tears when I read the email and realized how very wrong I was to ignore that email from the summer. *sigh* I even remember mentioning to my roommate that "Wow, we've lost so many teachers this year and I don't personally know any of them."
Anyways, my research experiment is getting really bizarre (aka opposite of what we expected) results but I'll spare you guys a long rant about that. What a weird day.