iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Beware the jubjub bird, and shun the frumious bandersnatch!

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is how he describes my sadness: “a distinct lack of warmth from you.” Because what I feel only matters in its effects on others.

031

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

One of my students made me Zen art.

031

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

One of the things we’ve lost in the age of collapse is self-forgiveness. Everything seems so poignant, so pointed. There’s little room for grace as we feel compelled to move the story to a better place.

030

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I just learned there are hundreds of billions of planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone! Whoa.

000

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Bad ideas: Cast-iron backpacks. See-through handkerchiefs. Fish saddles. Lobster manicures.

120

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

If parents want to help higher ed real fast, make concrete inquiries about administrator salaries at campus tours. That’s where all the money is going. If a school is eliminating programs while paying administrators big bucks, call them out. Walk away. Then things will change.

0101

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

“Can’t you take a joke?” or “I was only kidding!” presumes that only the speaker gets to decide what counts as “funny” and everyone else is supposed to agree, whether they actually agree or not.

030

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Have you seen all these would-be influencers using AI to craft self-help monologues that they then quick-edit into reels or TikToks and try to run themselves like ad hoc therapists? Some are even charging big bucks for “extra” content. Zero credentials; and borrowed slop insights. This is bad.

010

Reposted by Rachel Wagner

All American @blueskyairborne.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

bsky.app/profile/raer...

032

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

What would the world be like if we all told the truth about who we are? What if we let ourselves be raw and whole, despite the noise from those less inclined, let ourselves say we love the world? What if the fight for change is also the call to root oneself in vulnerability through care?

000

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

WTF Texas? “The State Board Education is expected to give final approval Friday to controversial social studies and history curricula that all Texas high school students must learn. Lessons depict Islam as a violent religion and Christianity as an essential cornerstone of the nation.”

houstonpublicmedia.org

Texas State Board of Education set to OK anti-Islam social studies curriculum | Houston Public Media

The State Board Education is expected to give final approval Friday to controversial social studies and history curricula that all Texas high school students must learn. Lessons depict Islam as a viol...

120

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

This extremely smart dog can now open the front door *and* the screen door to let herself out to scare the bejeezus out of delivery drivers.

020

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Maybe one of the reasons God is dying in highly mediated cultures like the US is that God isn’t an influencer and you can’t get a following anymore if you don’t have an Instagram account and a TikTok feed.

000

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Using A.I.to write essays is like hiring a robot to perform your ballet performance. And letting that robot base its ballet performance on a random combination of pre-existing dance pieces. Yes, there would be a performance, and yes it could be interpreted. But you wouldn’t be the dancer.

011

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

A.I.’s threat is less the death of the author (which we have already been considering for some time) but the death of the writer. Writing is its own reward because it helps us discover who we are and what we care about.

021

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

It’s so predictable that so many white conservative men want us to just forget Mitch McConnell isn’t doing anything. White men should be paid and treated like they are working as hard as everyone else even when they’re dead, incapacitated, or just lazy and playing golf.

032

Reposted by Rachel Wagner

Angry @angrystaffer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

It’s been almost 90 days since the American people have seen or heard from Mitch McConnell. We’re still paying his salary.

1147199815534

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Because I can’t stand JD Vance & hated Hillbilly Elegy before anyone gave a damn about it, I just now realized he’s been stealing from bell hooks the whole time. Appalachian Elegy—> Hillbilly Elegy. Communion: The Female Search for Love—>Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. What a complete tool.

120

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

We’re seeing in my Religions of the Future course how climate care & transhumanism are opposed. One religious dream of immortality kills another religious dream of community with the earth. Escape versus presence. Destruction versus care.

040

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I love it that the young-uns are wearing stars ⭐️ on their pimples now. Like, fuck you and your shame about my skin! I’m doing self care, darn it.

000

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I find it amusing people are like, “I want to use AI to make *my* life easier but *you* can’t.” Don’t get me wrong. I don’t use it, don’t like it. I’m talking about folks who want to, say, use it for hiring people but don’t want the people applying for those jobs to use it in their applications.

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

I’ve been trying to finish my syllabi in the car while my partner drives. The interstates are so bad in Arkansas and Tennessee that I can’t work. Banging and bouncing nonstop on uneven roads. Infrastructure crumbling.

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Went to see my parents after 15 years not for reasons. Took my 11 year old + 32 year old w/chronic health challenges and he refused to hug *both* of them. Stuck his damned hand out and grinned crooked and said “Shake.”

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

You get to be the person that makes your kids know without a doubt they are loved in the world, if you choose it. I chose it, even though my own parents did not.

140

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I drove 20 hours to come to Arkansas where I grew up and even though I’m here, the place is still just as far away. It’s 40 years ago and in my old front yard where I kicked up dust on a rope swing under a walnut tree, locked out of my own house for being a body in space.

040

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

One of the earliest memories I have of my father is him putting foot powder in his shoes and explaining athlete’s foot to me. I have no memories at all of him asking me what I love, or why I’m scared, or who I want to be.

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

It’s strange to realize you never existed to your parents. That you were decoration for a life that only made two people real. “I want a family” meant to look like a family, not the desire to know or nurture the little humans in your home. Ah, that’s why I wasn’t supposed to make noise or disagree.

020

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

When I was 18 I got a letter from the White House telling me I’d won a national award. My mother told me outside the post office where we picked the letter up that surely this was a trick, some false advertisement. Then they announced my name on the radio and she said I must have heard them wrong.

020

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

A.I. can fill out forms or schedule payments while drinking blood from our sick earth. But A.I. will never take your breaking heart and etch it into words that breathe apart from you, reminding you that you’re alive, you lived here unique and whole.

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Somehow I arrived on earth wanting to know what love is, but passed through people who only loved each other in broken ways. They made decisions only by what they could avoid, the ways that they could ward off meaningful movement in the world.

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I wonder what it’s like to willfully miss the only chance you’ll ever get to hold your grandson in your arms?

020

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I drove three days to bring my eleven-year-old son to finally meet his grandfather, who refused to hug the child when asked. Instead he thrust a hand out grinning with a hint of the derision I know so well and said only “Shake!”

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Child, you had no chance of being seen. The culvert in my front yard seemed huge when I was young and crawled through after rain had come and gone. Today I’d never make it through from here to there. Passage was always contingent, temporary.

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Trump is the wrung-out lifeline of generations of raw greed and theft, apotheosis of American dream eating. I know because my family too in much more modest ways devoured the land and so did yours. Whiteness is the soul that eats for free, that sees the world as scenery around a throne.

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

As a child I understood too much to settle easily into the family I was given. My brother chose drugs to cope with parents who never should have borne children. I, on the other hand, tried to understand them, and ended up with a lifelong broken heart.

020

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

We come through—not from—our parents, a jetty of old spirit. We might blow through friendly space but some of us make our way through storms and ill winds. We arrive, uneasy, no good footing. Disoriented always, a ghost that must learn to walk on its own.

011

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Over ten years ago I called my father to tell him I’d found my son living on the street with mental illness but couldn’t get him to come home with me. My father scolded me and said that Jesus wandered homeless too, was also poor. I put the phone down and walked away, let him scold an empty room.

020

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

His last words to me on this last visit, me whom he beat with his favorite leather belt when I was just five years old with ribboned pigtails in our living room: “Thanks for everything.”

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Some people choose, then choose again and again, not to be fully human—not to be in whole or holy relationship with the world. I came into this world through two such people. There will be no real redemption, no happy ending, no apology. Only an ending.

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

We have a house rented for a couple of days while I visit my parents in northwest Arkansas. We met a little toad and a walking stick by the pool. Earlier we met a little scorpion.

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Found at a rest stop outside Branson, Missouri. I think his arms are on backwards.

110

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Wondering if I should write a message in a closet in my conservative hometown in the South, while I’m visiting. Illegitimi non carborundum.

020

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Things I’m not supposed to write. A poem.

THINGS I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO WRITE

Already ghosts chase the car
like barking dogs with threats.
Already I regret this trip.
My father must be dying
with his shrinking spine
a dampened presence
laughing softly as if
old words adrift
like stars after a hit upside the head.
I’m six and on the floor
One, two, three of us on all-fours.
What did I do.
Mimosas hide their spiny leaves at dusk.
Who is to blame when he’s forgotten?
Last night I dreamed I lost my teeth
and I looked prettier that way.

010

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Look at these folks, traveling 18 hours each way to be with me while I visit my ailing elderly abusive father. ❤️

030

Rachel Wagner @drrachelwagner.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

What if…being “religious” (of whatever stripe) doesn’t make us moral beings? So if we know someone religious (or we are ourselves) we still have an obligation to wrestle with what a good life is? A good religious community can help us with that and a bad one can make us worse people. No shortcuts.

030