wednesday, my 6pm class (like all the others, and i swear there are folks just as adorable in the other sections, but i remember their anecdotes the most clearly b/c they're what i leave on, and i'm sure it helps that by that late in the day we're all a little punchy) divided themselves up into groups of three for peer-review workshops to do a last look-over of each others' first formal papers. our classroom has tables, not desks: uneven columns of 2-seat tables on one side of the room, then a great aisle, then 4-seat tables on the other side of the room, 6 rows deep. i put response questions on the board, answer a few whole-group questions about submission procedures from the front of the room, & then start to "circulate," which really involves a lot of slow pacing back and forth in a straight line down that aisle. at the end of the aisle, i find that E has wedged himself into the corner of the room with one of the 2-seat tables, and is waiting for T and Z to pull themselves and their wheeled chairs up to the table as if it's an executive desk. "I've made myself an office," he says.

on my next trip to the back of the room, i see that he's folded a piece of paper over lengthwise several times to create a desk-plaque. you can't read this in the photograph, but the desk plaque says "The Doctor in In." on my third trip to the back of the room, i see that he's folded up another, smaller piece of paper into the little sign you can see to the left of the first: it says "5¢." meanwhile, the peer reviews are going on, good feedback is being exchanged, and other folks are occasionally looking over to smirk and going back to work. on my fourth trip to the back of the room, i can't stand it anymore, and ask D, who has the technology on-hand, to take a picture and email it to me so that i cankeep it forever (T then flees before she ends up in pictures).



they're comfortable and happy enough in my class that they play.

---

* i know, i know, that's a recycled title and it's not mine anyway, but it's moment-appropriate. it really does burn. i walk out of these classes some days actually vibrating from the euphoria of just getting to be involved, however tangentially, with the depth of the silly. the fact that it's culturally-referential, smart, and didn't actually divert anyone from on-task learning makes it so much better that i probably blush, the grinning pulls my cheeks so hard. there really are times when the rush of loving what you('re blessed enough to be allowed to) do really is better than sex.

lotta folks haven't heard much from me lately. i've been busy, mostly doing really good, valuable, terrifically rewarding things, but they're hard to talk about. i pour 12 hours of energy at a time into teaching classes & wedge a few blocks of one-on-one tutoring in between them, and at the end of the day i can sputter vague phrases like "tired now...long drive zombie" and "it was okay?" at best, the long form is more like: "this was a pretty good day. i'd have liked to get a little more done w/my first class, and i had to kick out way too many unprepared kids without drafts to workshop from my third, but we had some fun. got some stuff done. i'm looking forward to reading their papers, even though i won't have time to do it." & unless you're in love with freshman composition, that probably sounds to you like some underpaid adjunct complaining about her job. :)

of course, if you're a normal human being & not in love with freshman composition, you also probably think i'm creepy when i throw that phrase around, & when i say "i'm in love with all of my students!" you have visions of bad, bad teacher-student relationships & creepy crushes on eighteen-year-olds that might have to be acted out in smelly dorm rooms. it makes sense to me, and i assure you i have no interest in sleeping with any of them, but i don't promise the sense it makes is more widely applicable, to, say, other folks with other sorts of jobs where predictable tasks tend to happen, exhaustion & euphoria aren't daily risks/perks, and all of the overworked-ness you're buried under is stuff you assigned in the first place. it's so much fun!

so between that, all the work i bring home from it, which out-weighs the hours i spend in class each week, and the children's book workshop i've got one more weekend class to teach this saturday, and baby-wrestling most thursdays, there's not much time left to even wander the wet sidewalks watching the leaves spin down, let alone to plan or execute adventures, think through a poem now and again, remember my family's birthdays (oops), or whinge about the micro-dramas of my inner self. i sneak in a little movie-watching or game-playing w/a few friends once a week or so, and curl up with cozy kitty-feet against my face, & wake up planning next week's classes in my head.

tea's steeped, & the pile of portfolios awaits--have happy thursdays, everybody.
(& p.s. happy birthdays to wahyagar yesterday, ranagar day after tomorrow, & crissi today!)

study hall conversation veers just like this:

P, meaning to be vaguely (and briefly) comedic by pointing out bad philosophy, bad grammar, or a combination of the two, reads aloud something from a student paper that sounds like it mentions, and probably misspells, "Candide"
D says "candy? yum."
J says "sweet, sweet sweetmeats"
H says "sweetmeats!? you did not say 'sweetmeats'"
I says "that's like candy for zombies"
H says "what's with the zombie thing going around lately?"
I says "P had the zombie thing last week"
H says "when you were sick?"
P says "I was kind of shuffling around."
I says "I kept thinking I should be wearing a helmet."
S finally pulls her headphones out & looks around, wondering why everyone is laughing.

(to protect his brains, see. i didn't need to explain, because of course you got that.)

here's blurry me getting ready for work this morning. i don't have time to screw around w/the camera to try to get a non-blurry one--the ninety frosh await! besides, w/the snotty head-cold i'm going off to try not to share with them (along with the lessons about fragments & run-on sentences i hope they do acquire), blurry seems apt--it's certainly how it feels inside this skull. wish me the stamina for 12 hours of cheerfulness--i'm off to be the teacher!

arrrrr.

(there's no one here it would make any sense at all to pirate-at, so it'll have to be you, dear internets. i mean, arrr, it'll have to be you, me beauties!)

list from annabel (that looks from her post title like she got it from or wrote it collaboratively alongside somebody else)

me? i don't talk about politics. it doesn't help. i know exactly how the world should work, you see, but standing around hollering hoping someone will listen just doesn't appeal. i've seen what happens when most people try to get other people to listen to reason. we're fonder of dirt and garbage, as a species, and i get my fair share of hollering & begging to be heard in classrooms with the material i'm actually knowledgeable about. so i'll smile and nod, vigorously, if i agree with you, or change the subject if i don't, but otherwise i keep my mouth shut. still, i can't resist occasionally rubbing some links together & lead the clever folks i know to find each other. :)

hey, speaking of april and september, kyneburh, do you still have that picture i drew for you my freshman year? if you scan it for posting purposes i will totally send you cookies.

a friend and i watched definitely, maybe this afternoon & found it cute. charming. funny, appealing, well-written, etc. all of the women in the "love story mystery" were engaging and interesting but in different ways; they were all portrayed as reasonable contenders for the ultimate affections of the protagonist without any of them being portrayed as awful--there were no fatal character flaws, no inherent deal-breakers, just different people drifting closer from and nearer to "right" for different reasons. & that was cool--it was a refreshing break from the story of the guy trying to finally come to his damn senses & go after the right girl when it's so obvious to the audience all along why the others are wrong.

also i appreciate the nested implied endings, so that solving one puzzle doesn't necessarily finish unwrapping the surprise inside. it's easy charm, but i liked it. the thing that's got me all over-thoughtful afterwards is (of course) the like-my-life-stuff, in not exactly "both good ways and bad ways" but more like in one mushy ball of goodandbadway. i've always wanted to be april, to play her role relative to the protagonist, to be the best friend he finds his way back to (or does he). always. lots of people do, i suppose, but i know lots of people who either want instead, or at least want some of each but want more to be the college sweetheart he ends up with in the end (or does he) or the mysterious, sophisticated, dark-haired writer-chick who sweeps him off his feet (or does she). i've wanted to be april since the 7th grade, when i remember listening to survivor's "the search is over" and hoping that the boy i liked, who i'd been friends with in 6th grade but we hadn't noticed each other like that--and he still didn't notice me like that, and arguably never did (although i think there were a few moments in our mid-20s somewhere)--would someday turn around and realize it had been me all along. i wanted it in high school, i wanted it in college, i wanted it after college...

the part that really messes with me, though, isn't that it was this sad little pretty-movie pipe-dream that never really happened. what messes with me is that i've been april. and not just once; what messes with me is how many times i've been april, how many times boys--sometimes different boys, and more than once (ok, more than twice) the same boy--have come back to me and said "it's you. it's been you all along." and then, of course, sometime later (the part where it's more than one, and more than once, makes this conclusion obvious), they changed their minds, and it turned out that they hadn't been on the right search after all, or they had some other priorities to attend to & finding me (again) just didn't fit into them.

i don't know if that makes me a totally unsuccessful april because it never sticks or a wildly successful april because nobody ever winds up in that role so many times in one life story. i'm sure that i've cultivated it somehow, but i'm not sure which how--or which part? do i cultivate the friendships and the rest happens on its own? do i cultivate the repetition by failing to actually be the "you all along" i seem to be?

dunno. this is one of those trains of thought that doesn't go anywhere in particular, by the way. if you were hoping for a dramatically insightful conclusion, you're out of luck. but it's a cute movie, anyway.

right this very second, on the couch with a computer in my lap & a cat beside me, all stretched out looooooooong to put his feet all over me. i've been making lesson plans & running tech support for my new students, to the best of my ability. yes, me, tech support. and, yes, they're the ones getting degrees at a tech school. sometimes i've found it's best not to inquire too deeply.

in less agonizingly specific terms, september finds me:

spending lovely little nuggets of usually-wholly-unplanned time with annabel & her darling little boys, the eldest of whom is usually wearing a cape these days

taking my vitamins in advance of being exposed to a new season of Every Germ That Goes Through The Dorms

hating my commute but loving my students enough to think they're worth it

working, like the true English-teaching adjunct always does, in the basement

hoping the paycheck ultimately makes up (at least a little) for the car-costs

busy, busy, busy trying to plan classes at least a day or two ahead (usually one)

trying, between those lines, to schedule a few lunches and/or coffees with friends before they totally forget what i look like

browsing far-away folks' burning man pictures & thinking "hey cool," and "maybe someday," and "wow the last week of my life felt way longer than the week they said they'd be there!"

regretting not having seen deity_inc's hair IRL

walking around the neighborhood past a few colored leaves while blessing the singing summer bugs that are still around

wishing my friends would quit getting mugged within a block of two of where i live

finding my new roommate's wedding pictures mostly charming and adorable and only a little bittersweet

grading grammar exercises

wondering what killed my strawberry plant, and why SK-L's basil is all leafy and fat and green and mine is all woody-stalked and tall-skinny and yellow

looking forward to apple season

struggling with some of the small details of combining friendships with a busy schedule--somehow "let's hang out" is more daunting when it involves choosing what to do for just one evening rather than for an amorphous string of 2 or 3 days

still waiting for initial comments on some dissertation chapters and for comments on the re-drafts of the others--all of which are promised to arrive soon and so will arrive pretty much exactly when i have actual paper-grading to do & thus have run out of time to revise from them

putting my few last stolen hours of novel-reading (borrowed the lovely bones last weekend and was surprised to find that it's actually really good) behind me for the sake of responsibility

missing live music (except on those marvy days when the fiddle gets practiced next door, 'cuz it's still open windows weather 'round here)

trying to figure out when i got old enough to be offering suggestions to my high school friends about parenting teenagers

still a little sugar-hungover from francis's "baltimore sundaes" the other night (no alcohol is involved. it's all the sugar)

planning on making up for it by reheating an early dinner of deliciously awesome gift-jambalaya

my caz class was canceled altogether last week, and i was disappointed at first--i was counting on the income from that one compensating for all the money i'm losing to gas and tolls (and projected snow-caused car-repairs) getting to and from the other four! but it's looking like that's probably for the best after all, because the other four? they're going to take all of my waking hours and probably most of the hours i'd planned to use for sleeping.

my students, so far, are awesome, & i have learned somewhere around 90 names so far, which would be all of them if they would stop switching their schedules around and just sit still. a couple of them were, on day 2, starting to act a little hide-the-cell-phone-when-i-walk-by shady, so i need to be a little more of a bitch--you try to be nice to the shy ones, because writing is scary and they've all had traumatic experiences, and somebody's always gotta push it & ask to meet the bitch--but never, when asking in a diagnostic writing-prompt question, about their experiences with writing to date, have i ever gotten so little complaining and so many people alluding to important letters or papers they've written, the forums they post to nightly, or to the songs, poems, short stories, games, and novels they compose in their free time.

the electronic course interface that the school uses, though (its version of blackboard) isn't available for everyone yet--they're still implementing it gradually, and right now you have to request an online presence for a course a semester ahead of time, which, since i was just hired, wasn't an option, & the webmail they use is a demonic domino-lotus timesuck where nothing works as a batch operation, everything you want to do involves opening three new screens, & my students are getting error messages for trying to send me their homework like i asked them to.

i'm not *quite* ready to bail, go back on what i told them, & just say "nevermind, we're doing it all through gmail," but i get a little closer every day (& it's been 5 or 6 days since i started arguing w/the technology, not just the 2 i've been in the actual classes). i've spent a few hours this morning sorting through and responding to the six or seven students who tried to follow the directions--yes, hours, see the problem?--& i'm going to have to cut myself off for a while if i'm ever going to get anything else done at all, like finishing the laundry, and, oh, right, finishing the source-connecting project on my desk so i can re-send my dissertation chapters off since labor day at this school is actually a holiday & so i only have one more class until next wednesday--i might actually have time to get the writing done before the job takes over utterly!

morning, with greyish skies and just-cool-enough temperatures to chill my bare feet and make fall seem probable (red leaves in the lowlands on the way across the state each morning) has been made much more pleasant with a little hot grapenuts (& some super-yogurt!) and a mug of isaac's earl grey, a fortunately soothing influence which has done wonders for my ability to not smash this poor machine, who is not to blame. most of my future teacher-commentary, for those of you who are interested, will be posted over at compositionism, for the sake of those of you who don't much care and also b/c some folks over there are lots interested, or at least they've said they are! if you're a teacher-person yourself (sometimerose, madyonk, claire-bear, robotapocalypse...) you might check it out and/or join up.

if you're wholly uninterested in those conversations altogether and just need a little cute to make your thursday brighter, have these meerkats, which saint213 and i found by way of a conversation about joe and beau biden (it made sense at the time, i promise). remember, as the image's home-site asserts:

"At any given moment, somewhere in the world, meerkats are snuggling."

my brother, who is funny no longer approved by the great nation of china shares this with the class.

yesterday’s entry marks the end of the photo-essay, ostensibly because we were way too busy hauling ass (louisiana, mississippi, georgia, tennessee, virginia, west virginia, maryland, pennsylvania, new york) to see anything on the road home worth photographing anyway, although that’s not entirely true—but when the rainbows that rocked my little world appeared, as we pulled into the mountain-country of southern virginia, like a technicolor interpretation of an angelic choir to call me home—the twisting highway wasn’t really stop-on-able, the rain on the window glass not clear-shots-through-able, and although we drove through the sun-bright trees cut-out against the charcoal sky beneath their concentric bows for at least an hour, by the time we hit a rest stop with a view in the right direction, they had faded almost all the way away. still. photographic record or not, i got the message. (among other highlights: leaving new orleans, still on I-10 but heading east this time, means different bridges, in this case the katrina-shattered twin span bridge, which used to be two bridges, but they used the pieces they had left to patch back together one to run traffic on while they build two new ones—twice as far above the water this time. driving and driving and driving into the blue with only water underneath is cool, & watching the cranes and barges build new bridge-parts, dropping huge concrete chunks of road onto these thin-looking poles poking up from who-knows-how-deep in the water is cooler still!)

we (and by “we” i mostly mean “he,” because although i willingly drove every time he actually wanted to be not driving, i didn’t do much driving) did it in two days—there were threats of aiming for one, but dark fell while we were still just an hour or two into virginia, at least ten away from syracuse, and there’s ridiculous and then there’s ridiculous--so we crashed in c-burg (and no, i didn’t call anyone to say hello, because we were exhausted and useless anyway and had to get up early, and we didn’t come up the road into actual b-burg anyway), ordered a pizza (having literally exhausted the road food—what we hadn’t eaten had started going a bit fuzzy), and ate it sprawled across hotel beds watching a food network special zeroing in on the geographies we’d only just left behind & thus extending our immersion just a little longer: the rivershack tavern, where the best show-highlighted recipes aren’t on the website (but the turtle soup is). in the morning i snuck off into the brambles behind the parking lot to augment my hotel breakfast with just one rainy blackberry—had to let them know that i was there—and then we flung ourselves northward with all the momentum we could muster, barely making it before the sleepy and cranky and tired of cars took us over.

and then the packing and the moving and the heartbreaks and hand-breaks and babysnuggles and visiting with neighbors and popping up to faire and chasing more rainbows and dinner-slash-sangria parties upstairs and otherwise cramming a suddenly-ending summer into a couple of frantic weeks, & voila: school, which is completely freaking me out right now, starts monday, so that's summer wrapped & fall arriving. & yes, i know it's still august, but no, i'm not being reductionist about school = fall, i live in the northcountry. look:

sunday we only had a little coffee at the house before heading out to the re-instated projects, driving between caged lots that looked like the used to be basketball courts and playgrounds that were instead full of random piles and broken grids of pvc, which we finally figured out were the pipes—still there—for the trailers when those were the temporary housing plots on higher ground, to go prowling around st. louis cemetery no. 1, the oldest of the three, where the dead live (and are yet adored) in neat (and crumbling) houses of all sorts of ages, in mazelike rows with iron crosses (and even they have balconies), and to find and make wishes at marie laveau’s tomb. (which isn’t in this picture—more prowling is required.)
that done—our spiritual deed for the holy day—it was time to case the market one more time, assess the crowds at cafe du monde, decide they were absurd, order our coffees (iced lattes) and beignets at “cafe beignet” across the street instead, sip said lattes, read the newspaper, and chat while the pastries were frying up hot, and then take them to a shady but quieter place around the corner to burn our fingers and tongues noshing on their messy sugary goodness before taking our third dive through the market (and up and down the streets for just a little longer—because: free samples of fresh, crumbly-soft pralines at the market candy shop, smart-assed fema t-shirts, and the burning question of whether the indiana jones hat was awesome enough to be owned in two colors) to actually acquire presents for our people and ourselves. then it was time for our much-anticipated soul-food luncheon at the praline connection where the entire staff of the restaurant seems to be made up of beautiful & photogenic young black men in smart black hats, who seemed to be the drawing force for at least some of the clientèle, as picture-taking kept going on, and where, between the lot of us, we ended up with a table heavy with gumbo, red beans & rice, jambalaya, collard greens, fried chicken, catfish, & the necessary accompaniment of many glasses of sweet tea—SK-L’s selection even came with a generous little cup of bread pudding that, between the three of us, we couldn’t finish—and i brought enough of our leftover greens and beans home to have for dinner! (plus, guess what: there were more balconies!) with a massive return-trip looming in our monday-morning future, and, honestly, with all three of us being absolutely beaten to halfway catatonic from the humidity-n-sunny-heat combination (100 degrees at 70% humidity, seriously—but did i mention i love the balconies?) we decided another evening in was in order; the lads mostly played video games & watched south park, sasha whined through another storm, and i finished my postcards and then read almost all of this (so i still felt thoroughly entrenched in my surroundings, anyway!): which we’d kept passing in bookstores as we shopped, and which the owner of the host-house happened to have a copy of. it’s a collection of short essays by columnist chris rose that take place over the year and a half of-and-immediately-after katrina, and they are at times creepy but often also funny and are mostly really, really fascinatingly revealing depictions of the long, long story that most of us only saw as at most a couple weeks’ media coverage, a story that i don’t think most folks realize is still going on, for many folks to the exclusion of everything else, three years later. evidence other than the pipes: fema trailer and search-and-rescue x-mark in uptown (where it stayed mostly dry--ima_spoony_bard says the 9th ward still looks like a war zone, and didn’t take us—and where even the well-off folks in the expensive houses are just now getting a chance to think about calling first-dibs on having their flood-damaged basements repaired). i recommend the book—he’s an excellent writer, and it’s appreciably eye-opening. it was also a great end-cap to our short visit: because we were staying in uptown, where the writer lives, and because when you write about new orleans you write a lot about the quarter, where we’d been hanging out, i recognized a lot of place-and-street names already, which added a layer of texture & depth to both the reading and the seeing. and on our way out of town in the morning, i knew the proprietor’s name on a barber’s-shop window that went zipping by—he’d been featured in one of rose’s essays as operating on the street under the open roof of a closed gas-station during the weeks after, when power was hard to come by and store-fronts were gone, and when the essay was written he’d had no clue how he might start to go about starting over; it looks like at least a few of those stories do have happy endings.

...but we did check off vampire hunters (what else would you call a man in priests’ garb with a giant cross around his neck striding, in dubious company, purposefully enough along the avenue for said cross to work up a noticeable swing?), a vampire-hunter-equipment-shop, a couple of witching stores, and some stars and the sun and some clouds and a couple of nice, rainy thunderstorms either overhead or right in the vicinity, and those were just the jumping-off points! first things first, then, we did spend our first evening in new orleans on bourbon street; ima_spoony_bard knew where to park and where to go and led us around like he’d known the place for years instead of weeks, so even with being tired from the length of the road & calling it an early night, we managed étouffée and zydeco at cajun cabin, where the frontman made the frat boys in the crowd take turns playing the washboard for the band, ("big ass") beers on the streets for the lads & something pink & slushy (of the two choices...) for me while we wandered the streets, considered the shrines & the toys at marie laveau’s house of voodoo (where many signs disallow pictures because the shrines are sacred, but the web sees all, so you can see it here, in shots taken at not-so-shine-centric angles), checked out the mostly naked undergrads (if they were that old) beckoning passers-by from the doorways to the strip clubs, saw a couple strands of beads earned from a party of enthusiastic drunk women on a mid-street balcony, scoped out shops we would come back to during daylight hours, took this eerie picture of a shadow-statue on the less-obviously-identifiable backside of the st. louis cathedral, and wound up crossing the train tracks to end up on the river, watching the city lights mirrored in the ripples and the oil spill crawl along the rocks.

i’ve got the ways and means to new orleans
i’m going down by the river where it’s warm and green
i’m going to have a drink and walk around--
i’ve got a lot to think about
saturday we got moving slowly, sipping coffee at the house and browsing magazines and movie-times, sketching out proto-plans with maps and good intentions, then found a mall to grab a matinée of the x-files movie, which we re-named “whatever happened to mulder & scully”--i think the boys were complaining when they said that, but i’m okay with it. i agree that the plot and the characters weren’t really that dependent on each other—it could have been a just-fine freaky-ass crime-solving-with-a-possible-psychic movie without being an x-files movie—but last time when it was all deep in the arc & the alien spaceships, that was too much x-files in folks’ x-files; this seemed like a fair direction to go to appease that crowd of protesters and at the same time answer the mulder-and-scully question once and for all. half-starved by the end, we next went for shrimp po-boys at domilise’s, reputedly the best po-boys in town, and mine was awesome, so i’m not one to argue, but talk about a place you have to know how to find before you’d ever find it (unless you knew the name already—the web is all over it, without so much as a city added to the keyword)! directions wouldn’t help; you’d drive right by it on the street even with an address in your hand.
then to the quarter to roam the streets & the french market for hats, souvenir-scoping, browsing of every sort, wandering down pirate’s alley past the psychics on the edge of jackson square, & hiding out the rain sifting through bookstores of every age and depth of mustiness. i picked this up for $2, having never heard of it (despite its having been out since 1986, and despite me having spent literally years in the sci-fi/fantasy sections of used bookstores ever since about 1986), but figuring anything with praising blurbs from mccaffrey, zelazny, and auel had to have some merit, & i killed a nice chunk of last week being pleasantly right. also, did i mention that i was more than a little bit obsessed with balconies, and kept taking pictures of more and more and more of them?
when the shops closed we went for a drink & to hear a little of the delta blues at the spotted cat (that’s a bar) before the storm drove us home to rest in the a.c. (for values of “us” more equaling the boys—i stayed out on the porch swing watching the sky go purple and the rain run down the street in rivers until i was damp enough to need new clothes), keep sasha the frantic dog (not a bar) company (sasha is thoroughly un-fond of thunderstorms), order a pizza (which i let them get barbecue sauce & chicken on, which meant it wasn’t actually a pizza-flavored pizza), & write postcards while watching the x-men (ii) (to be visually thematic about it, i guess, even if the subjects themselves have nothing to do with one another).

so friday morning we drove into (and immediately went walking in) memphis, and started off with a little picture-taking at the visitors’ center, a cup of coffee within walking distance (much harder to find than in seattle!) that i had iced despite how it was 9 in the morning because it was hot as hell, and then a trip across the breezy bridge over to mud island to check out the mississippi & learn a little about trips and distances.
mud island mississippi river model:

that map of the whole river thing? it’s way cool. plus you can see the whole thing from space in google earth, which is also way cool. we walked the length of it with our feet bare, in & out of the water; SK-L wandered all the way down into bayou country, but we were out of crepe myrtles by then, and i had to huddle behind in the shade. the park didn’t open ‘til 10, and we were sunburned & hungry by 11, so we headed down to beale street instead (humming as we passed by union avenue to get there) to do the tourist oggling thing, rifle through the infinite quantities of undefinable junk & treasures at the a. schwab general store, shop for a few actual souvenirs for ourselves, and let all the restaurant barkers try to pull us in to six different options for barbecue before seeking our lunch at the blues city cafe where we’d been planning to go all along, so SK-L could have some allegedly-world-famous (or at least food-network-famous) ribs & i could stuff myself with catfish fried in cornmeal like it oughta be, watched over by the king. the banners over the grill inside said "put some south in your mouth"; with an imperative like that, what’s to be done but follow directions?

(oh, and funny story, which you might have noticed if you were really paying attention for those last few links—that’s actually claire’s rib dinner and her décor shots, taken a month previously when her leaving me involved a side-trip to bonnaroo from which her gang took a side-trip to memphis. i didn’t have the camera out during lunch, but fortunately, she did! and no, we didn’t plan it.) from there, SK-L & i rolled back to the car & found our way back to the highway, to get off on 51—a.k.a. elvis presley boulevard—to drive past (the gates of) graceland to say we’d (watched the tourists walk-on-through) driven past graceland and then pick up the highway again down mississippi-way. don’t get me wrong, i’ve nothing against the king, but at $60+ just to get in the door, we thought we could do better with our money. so we took this picture to prove we were there, and ate a pair of these in the car to show we had the spirit.

then it was into mississippi, for maps and free cokes at the welcome center (all the rest stops in mississippi came with signs on the highway letting you know whether or not “security" was “provided"--and i really couldn’t decide if i found that much more daunting than driving through states who didn’t feel the need to alert me from the far-off safety of my car about the likelihood (and presumed need?) of a close-by cop wherever i might stop for a pee) and a whole lotta driving, past some state parks we didn’t see, through miles and miles of book on tape that i’ve almost completely forgotten already, and through lots of shared aggravation at the mp3 randomizer in SK-L’s car, which re-sets to zero every time you turn off the car & thus tried to play some of the songs on our several-thousand-track playlist never at all and others sixteen times. sometimes we’d fast-forward through twenty in a row--"heard that. heard that too"--before getting one we weren’t already sick of. somebody needs to take that technology back for another think-through. mississippi bled into louisiana somewhere in the 7ish hour, and somewhere in the midst of miles and miles of what felt like a gorgeous, alien-landscape, neverending bridge-tour of the swampy bayou--

--we traded in I-55 (from 40, from 65, from 71, from 90) for I-10 & followed her in, using our too-broad maps and a little zen (the louisiana welcome center, of course, by the time we got that far, was closed) and finally a cell phone to hone in on ima_spoony_bard’s locale, popped in long enough to drop stuff off & hop into his cruiser instead for a quick dash across a couple neighborhoods, & voila, new song for you: destination achieved, friday evening found us touch[ing] down on bourbon street.

(or if this is more your style:
“nighttime on the city of new orleans,
changing cars in memphis, tennessee.
half way home, we'll be there by morning
through the mississippi darkness
rolling down to the sea.”

thursday morning i insisted that we let the state at least try to redeem itself before we left it, so we found the nearest park, wandered around its nature center for a while, & then went trespassing past a road-closed sign in search of a river. in my head, ohio is poetically valuable for having rivers, so our successfully finding one (past the spider-web high-rise & the discarded cans & bottles by the ghost of someone's fire) validated that part of the countryside a good deal. i think we decided the water we found was part of caesar creek, or at least it was attached to the caesar creek state park--it's hard to tell from the map & the park & the reservoir if there's actually a creek involved anymore. but there were men fishing on it, and things jumping, and sparkling water, and so i consider it a successful quest. after that, our next quest was to drive to louisville (check), actually acquiring a free highway map of kentucky on the way (check--and we found an open center to give us an ohio one, too), take pictures of the giant bat(s) outside the louisville slugger factory/museum (check), and ascertain that louisville is, indeed, as weird as it’s proud of itself for being. evidence of the weird: pimpcar, flames, penguins!

then we followed paul's and isaac's instructions to seek out lynn's paradise café--which paul led me to from where we were via google on his end & texting to mine, like any good chloé would--and once we'd turned where his successive texts told us to, paying enough attention to where we were that we actually would make it back out of louisville with only a few turn-arounds & far, far less guesswork than buffalo, we found the destination to be more than worth the recommendation and the many turns and the texting around the strange city and the late start to the afternoon!

at lynn's, a number of things were true: it was just as bright and chaotic and wonderful inside as that café with the moon in its name in baltimore that l_stboy used to frequent and crow about and took me to exactly once, before he moved away. it had trees in the middle, with chickens stapled to them. the orcas. and dinosaurs. and lots of other weird, weird things. they were right in the middle of an ugly lamp contest; diners were to bring in ugly lamps--either already ugly or made that way--to add to the restaurant's decor until the judging, at which time someone would win something wonderful, probably food. the food was wonderful. not cheap, but wonderful enough to keep us from caring (or maybe that was the mint julip). SK-L had a big old pile of french toast cooked up in So-Co with strawberries & chocolate & whipped cream & who knows what other kinds of rich, creamy goodness, and some sort of a beer he was well pleased with, and i had a fried green tomato sandwich (!!!) and a julip thick with clusters of fresh mint, which was not only tasty, it saved the day; i had been working up to a tantrum about how we weren't going to have time to both tour some distilleries to taste kentucky bourbons and make it as far as we wanted to get that day (plus i'd said all along the two things i wanted to do in kentucky were see horses and have a mint julip), so lynn's saved us the extra jaunting and got us farther down the highway without any more of my complaining!
where the day was saved:

plus, it came with the added bonuses of some had to have souvenirs and/or birthday presents for a few of our friends and charming photo opportunities in the parking lot. (as an aside, i saw horses in tennesee, virginia, and mississippi, but i had to pretend they were in kentucky, because they weren't.) after that, we spent the rest of thursday pretty much the same way as we spent the rest post-lunch part of wednesday: we drove and drove and drove and drove (i had to text ranagar from nashville traffic passing by the sign announcing clarksville) and stopped as it got dark while we were still far enough outside the next major city to not pay city (or suburbia) hotel prices.

yep.

couldn't resist.

bad poetry canon wordle, ici:



what's interesting to me about this one is that they're all such... good, small, basic, anglo-saxon words. you don't get art and nuance when you run hundreds of pages of poetry through a counting-machine, you get the straw & glue of the mud-daub hut the poet crouches inside, glaring at the fire--you get the little nouns and verbs and emphases, but little-to-no specificity. clearest of all is what poetry is: the act of setting things against other things to discover how & what & why they're like.

i want to run out & grab 30 poets & run all of their canons through & see how very much the same our answers look, no matter how different the final versions of our works.

edit/add-on: wordle for the complete works of shakespeare"

now, because i'm a nerd, i have a question about the algorithm. i already assumed it was cutting out the "a" & "of" & "the"-s that search engines overlook, but looking at my own work, an awful lot of which is direct-addressed to the second person, and looking at the shakespeare build... i can only imagine the machine was told to overlook modern forms of "you" but not the older sort.

wordle for my visible blog right now (before i post anything else):


more posts to come. and likely more wordles, because omg cool. (the tiny pictures are links that take you to a readable version of each one. next, i'm thinking of my entire bad poetry canon.)

wordle for the introduction to my dissertation (since that's the distilled overview of the whole project anyway & thus likely representative):

because ima_spoony_bard had a summer internship in new orleans, and because SK-L had fond memories of new orleans, and because i’d always wanted to see new orleans, and because SK-L and i like ima_spoony_bard, and because along with the intership ima_spoony_bard had a house-sitting gig and thus we had a free place to stay in new orleans, and because we’d got to talking about road trips and the rising price of gasoline and how this might be the last summer in our lifetimes when two academics on our wee little salaries could actually afford to take a road trip (i did the calculations: gas alone & staying with friends, it would have cost the same amount to drive as to fly solo. paying for gas and hotel rooms so as to control our schedule—and make it as fast as possible with no extra visiting thrown in—cost more than two plane tickets would have, but, darnit, we saw more world!), SK-L and i drove—yes, drove—to new orleans. and back. via canada and through many states and over many many miles. because he has an actual job during the summer, even with the pushing around of his hours, we had a week to work with total; because ima_spoony_bard had the “job" that had him there in the first place, he could only play with us on a weekend, and thus, voila, the mad plan was formed. wednesday, thursday, friday, sightsee a little and traverse the country; saturday and sunday, explore new orleans; monday and tuesday, traverse the country again but this time without looking at anything that couldn’t be seen from the car (or on the food network).

so first we went to niagara falls, because i’d never been there either and because it’s on the way. really. look:
without niagara falls:

View Larger Map

with niagara falls:

View Larger Map

(can you see maps? they display in my editor, and the links work, but on my screen now that it's up, i get no maps. if you see no maps, follow the links to the maps!)

once there, we peered over the railings at the rainbows in the froth, played with the gorillapod, walked up to and over the high, high bridge to canadia, which only required flashing an ID on the other side to be let through the door, wandered around watching tourists and the water-plume and more tourists for a while, took a picture of the hard rock café on the canadian side, popped in for a souvenir, and headed back across the bridge because there were dark, dark clouds gathering and we didn't want to be killed by lightning while trapped on the bridge. canada
getting back onto the bridge at all cost us $1.00, and getting back off on the other side took 15 minutes of standing in line to wait our turns to have our documents inspected and a mini-interrogation about how long we'd been there (about half an hour?) and whether or not we were bringing in anything untoward or dangerous (a guitar-pin?). once deemed safe, we were allowed to dodge raindrops as best we could to get back to the visitor's center to check out postcards and memorabilia of an amazing and in some aspects unspeakable variety before heading back to the car, looping around to get a picture of the hard rock café on the american side, and driving down to buffalo to meet back up with our west-bound highway, and, since it was lunchtime by then anyway, to check out the original home of the buffalo wings. new york
these were pronounced not the best he'd ever had but still pretty darn good by SK-L, & i had to agree that, for wings, which i'm not that fond of, they were quite tasty.

getting out of the center of buffalo turned out to be a lot more sinuous & a little more complicated than getting in, but we are clever, clever folks & managed it, and that pretty much concluded the "highlights" portion of day 1. we kept driving, of course--out of new york, across the skinny part of pennsylvania (where on tiptoes from the welcome center it was possible to see the lake)... pennsylvania
...and down, down, down into ohio. here are the things i learned about ohio while we did our afternoon-and-evening's zipping: it has gorgeous clouds, but we were too busy driving to take pictures of them. it has corn, where pennsylvania had grapevines. it has attractions like "grandpa's cheese barn" that i very much wanted to investigate, but although daylight in ohio in july goes on until something like 9 in the evening, everything closes at something much more like 5, including the welcome center where we wanted a free map and were denied, and grandpa's cheese barn, where we were also denied. ohio
the first hotel we tried to crash in once we gave in to darkness and tiredness (and figured if we kept going they'd get more expensive, as we were on the edge of the sticks heading towards cincinnati) denied us too. so while we did find a place to spread out our maps, munch a dinner of car-snacks, and sleep, we also concluded about ohio that in addition to gorgeous clouds and lots and lots of fields of corn, it was notable for being closed.

She understood, and said "yes" anyway.

(i generally hate this thing, and feel similarly about hemingway--not that he wasn't gifted, because he surely was, but i don't need someone else to wring out the dreary & dry in the world around me--i can see it just fine, thanks, & would far rather put my energy into looking for what else. but metalmonkey put it up with a particularly good response as an opening challenge, and i was reminded of how erc had a book of very, very short stories with some tiny word limit (20?) that i loved (despite how more than half of them involved a murder), so i thought i'd play along, just for a moment...)

in the morning (so we're now at 9 july) i was awake long before everybody else & let myself out, back door, porch-screen, bungee-latch on the fence between the yards, & wandered up the lane, because in blacksburg lanes have “up"s—“up" is topographical, into the mountains, & if you follow them far enough you usually find flowered meadows, chickens in cobbled-together fenced henyards, & trailers with windchimes overgrown with berry bushes, morning glories, seed-heavy grasses, & laurels. i found one where the road ended on a ridge, one T leading to a family graveyard, the other another driveway & a huge tree where a 2-person porch swing had been rigged under a flat branch to swing out over a fast slope & a view of a deep, wooded valley. breakfast was rain-glittered blackberries from the sunny side interspersed with honeysuckle washed pale inside from the extra water. i saw horses, greeted llamas, walked past thistles taller than my head, and am still trying to find the language to explain to people why that’s incontestability “home." “it was just a street with some houses," i said to cael a few days later, in a cheerful lunch-hour suburban starbucks up in centreville where we met for chai and chocolate, “but it was thomas lane," which is a literary reference he & about 8 other people i know, all but one of whom read the book because i told them to, would recognize. “what are you doing up here," he asked in reply; “how did you get out of underhill?" i’m not entirely sure yet that i have; i can still smell it on the queen anne’s lace, which doesn’t have a scent per se, and see it in the clouds kicked up by the same mountain range even this far north.

i couldn’t stay in faerie then & miss my lunch date with my mentor, so i headed into town (with time enough to sip coffee at bollo’s just to make sure i really knew what “home" felt like in all its chalk and red-brick textures)--
--wandered a bit of campus with jules_11, & then met up with paul, who took me to gillie’s for lunch with aileen (completing my tour of as many of my favorite restaurants as could possibly be hit in one 24-hour stint in town!), praised me up one side and down the other for still not having dropped out (or set anything, anyplace, or anyone on fire), reminded me again what i like about my field—and what it’s like to be really liked professionally—caught me up on local colleagues’ successes, bragged about his kids, introduced me to departmental new additions, & made me feel all teary and adored.

he then made me laugh for several days by describing an uncomfortable scene wherein he was introduced by one of our mutual acquaintances to another in terms that i promised to blog (and for which, unsurprisingly, lolcats has a linkable image handy for the visual learners): “i could feel myself inching backwards every time they spoke like a cat backing away from a hairball."

getting out of the lovefest of lunch was exactly the opposite, and included several iterations of hugging & continuing to shout messages of goodwill and scraps of story down the sidewalk as we tried to go about our day in separate ways, but ultimately i had to get on the road so that i could be in lexington in time for another coffee—iced, this time, & with a summer rainstorm as accompaniment—with my dear friend mikel, who had moved away to wisconsin without telling me but just happened to be teaching the last week of a summer program right then, right there on my drive through, & so we spent a lovely hour or two touring the town & campuses, delving into underground wine-and-cigar shops, nattering about best paintings in school libraries, and talking at length about lake geographies, grad programs, his bands, european tours, students, teaching, office hours under street lamps, his new house his adorable wife was already in madison painting, & whatever else came to mind as we wandered. here's the rain coming in, seen from a high spot on W&L's campus: mikel is so amazingly like an alternate dimension version of my brother--he does slightly different music things, he went the academic route rather than the route of being the deep-why-thinker in a pool of folks who mostly don't, and he chose different substances to be heavily influenced by in his youth, but they're so much the same in how they show affection, how they voice affection and commentary on politics and, really, talking about just about everything. mikel's version is usually less angry and more rueful; brek laughs more, usually sardonically, when he describes the things he sees. but the way they say "hey buddy" when they talk to me is nigh onto identical.

so i didn’t want to leave him—i never, never have—but had traffic to dodge & miles to go before i slept, as sleeping was scheduled to happen at mommy’s house, potentially after making a yet-unscheduled dinner date with message2_love, and anyway the black clouds were rolling back in fast & furious, & so onward i drove, stopping somewhere on 66 for gas and a wander among the wildflowers to make a plan—for the next night instead—and call my mommy to tell her i was on my way. the next few days were a relative whirlwind of caffeine and sugar with cael, delicious pasta & salad & blueberries out at message2_love’s cool new place in alexandria (i found clay’s ninja!), wine with her, wine with mommy, movies with mommy, phone-tag with noahs_mom that never resulted in our getting together despite how we swore this time we’d make it happen, thanks to illness on her part & the dealio with the vet, and being in vets’ offices with mommy & her sick cat. the vets were very nice, but sick-cat-day was a very long day, and fluffy keri russell movies were really all we were up to by the time it ended, & then somehow all of a sudden it had been almost two weeks already since i’d left my cat at home alone with an almost complete stranger, & it was time to get back in the car & return to the ‘cuse to gear up for the seattle adventure—which involved stopping first by the einstein’s in springfield for pre-lamaze-class bagel sandwiches with high school friend susan & her hubby john & their incubation project.

so after a lot of mental anguish about whether or not it was okay? advisable? warranted? downright necessary? to leave the state in july, as those of you who saw me in carolina can attest, i put my butt in the car on the morning of the second and drove to raleigh in a straight shot that got me there before 4 in the afternoon (this can be done, if one leaves syracuse before full light and clears the mixing bowl in advance of noon). i was trepidatious for approximately one thousand and three reasons, but they all turned out to be at least mostly unfounded (and the few that linger have been filed under “build a bridge," where they will remain for the foreseeable future), and as the few brief small-boy-inspired posts i made from there demonstrate, the one true party was a success, a good time was had by all despite the going-round of some kind of a tummy-bug (that mercifully passed me by), and photos from the event are characterized by: temporary tatoos, small children, henna body-art, power-tools, outdoor structures, board games, card games, video games, corsets, kilts, partial (the “more than really partial" was kept off-camera) nudity, field trips, deck-lounging, and lots and lots of food. other elements that didn’t make the photo-essay included sushi, birthday cake, plastic divers and sharks, invisible tv shows, tours of local houses, dancing (with more partial—and hardly-partial—nudity) in thunderstorms, and lots of alcohol, much of it lemony and homemade and delectable. and yes, i know i’ve said some of that already, but you can’t tell me it’s not worth reliving twice!

also, it was like this:

the photo-set is here among my picasa galleries, but only 2 or 3 of the images so far have captions. i keep meaning to get to that. really i do. please visit the site and comment to tell me "the pictures are great but they need captions, dammit"; this should encourage me.

then on the 8th, when i finally got around to leaving, i headed into blacksburg around mid-day to have coffee and conversation with jeff & kat, a bit of tickling and wrestling with their adorable small people that somehow involved plastic ark-animals, and non-ark-animals, most memorably uncle scar, crawling around inside liam’s clothes. bethany, of course, is way too mature for that sort of thing. she’s not amused (or wrestling) at all in the pictures i took. this one is of me and jeff, who both happened to be born that day, on one year or another. i think, despite us having known one another since middle school and known this factoid the entire time, it’s the second picture of the two of us ever taken (i have one from my high school graduation) and the first one ever taken on our birthday. (i know i said i wasn’t having one, but i couldn’t very well keep him from having one, and when in rome, dontcha know.) the visit also included a thorough tour of the gorgeous house they helped design & had build out in the monkey-county hills, and along that tour i found, on his desk, much to kat’s utter amusement (“that thing?") the panel of chain mail, made of rings wrapped around a screwdriver for a high school project, that arguably started the whole damn (completely un-encapsulatable, so forgive me for not even trying) thing back in the day.

the road back home:

thus i made my way to the adorable house of jules_11 (& steve & cairo), & she & i headed over to west_wind’s to meet baby taylor, say hey to bob, watch some good, dark, mountain thunderheads roll in and rain a bit & roll back out again, & then we girls went out to re-enact grad school 1.0, beginning at the beginning, with dinner & drinks at boudreaux, where our classmate charles is tending bar & where once upon an English department we had our very first EGSO meeting ever (& thus that saga began). after heaps of fascinatingly revealing intimate conversations i’ll never tell another soul about, we wandered down main st. to backstreets for tiramisu, and then stopped in at the pub just to breathe the familiar density of smoke-and-alcohol air, listen to dillon on the jukebox (it never, never changes), & watch darts fly from hands known & unfamiliar. we left before risking recognition (or lung cancer) & called it an evening, although jules_11 and i ended up back at her place giggling at year-one photographs for another hour or so.

oh, & jules, to answer the question, i talked to aubin, & he says he knows exactly where our disappearing mr. smith (yes, funny enough, i know a few of them) is—MARRIED and in carolina.
!!!

downside of traveling: being so far out of the loop that you don't know for a whole month that your very good friend has become a daddy 'cuz you missed the announcement. congrats to dolmangar & the lovely d & welcome still-pretty-new darling baby addison!!!

deity_inc had to work all day on wednesday--"all day" meaning from about 2 in the afternoon ‘til what could have dragged into 2 in the morning if i hadn’t been there as a handy excuse to have to head out close to midnight, so i spent the day wandering the market (and more market--lunch was a fresh peach half as big as my head and a free sample of smoked salmon) and the streets (pioneer square, one city cross-street or another, elusive famous mountain) taking pictures, browsing bookstores, writing postcards, walking my feet numb, and, of course, drinking coffee. there’s a lot of coffee in seattle, as one might expect, and a lot of it actually isn’t starbucks, but a lot of it is. a lot. pretty much anywhere there might have been an empty space before, there’s coffee, and often it’s starbucks. this was by far my favorite “starbucks is like kudzu" example. if there’s a bit of ground to cover, that stuff will grow. & i took this picture just for sangeethadevi & ccangels & any other closet fans out there i might not know about:



‘round 8 i re-appeared at the triple door, where some kindly sommelier i happen to know had left me a reserve ticket to see ottmar liebert & luna negra--the above is a picture i took of the stage; this one is by the artist. he's fabulous, by the way; meandery melodic upbeat water-on-stones spanish guitar music that, if i hadn't already come somewhere close to finishing the darn thing, i'd buy to write my dissertation to. because i was a solo attendee, and it’s a tight-seating arrangement, i was paired with another solitary diner-slash-listener, an enthusiastic fangirl whose name i wasn’t quick enough to hold onto (it was something very like Sherry, so we’ll call her that) who was a longtime fan of the musician, loved everything about the venue, and kept me thoroughly entertained with interested and interesting conversation about spanish guitar, 80s childhoods, the seattle area, going to concerts alone, & whatever else came up throughout the evening. when my mysterious suited-and-wired MIB came by to check in on me and replaced her first lemondrop with another without her even noticing, she decided he was the coolest thing since sliced bread and i must be too by association. thanks to the peaches, the salmon, and the coffee, i wasn't hungry despite the restaurant's impressive menu, & told deity_inc so when he came by, to which i earned a reply paraphrase-able as “nonsense"; later he wandered by smooth as silk and handed me an unidentified glass of something dark and sweet (which turned out to be a ten-year-old madeira) and said “it’ll go well with dessert" as his only explanation. raised eyebrows were all he got from me for that—and for the ridiculously decadent chocolate whatever-it-was that appeared shortly thereafter, because i had to keep impressing Sherry (she and i had become such fast friends that i spent the first half of the show nibbling on her ahi bruschetta and she spent the second half helping me with the chocolate thing—we figured we’d been seated as dates, so we might as well act the part!). later, of course, when the showing off was over, i thanked him profusely. repeatedly. a lot. afterwards i met up with him outside—the band upstairs in the "musiquarium" was just too loud for me to wait by the fishies as i’d been told to do—and got a fast behind the scenes tour of the business end of the restaurant(s) (scary, scary service elevator) before we headed back to his place for studying, movie-watching, gabe-abuse, and of course more wine-sampling (jalapeno?!?).

thursday was characterized by a lot of sleeping-in—the rockstar life can do that to ya—some more coffee and postcards, lunch at a really tasty beergarden where in addition to the lunch foods of uber-deliciousness, several drink-able beer-related beverages appeared on the table—who am i again? after beer, a little bit of car-bound tourism in fremont (lookie!) and then a nice, sunny soccer match where i hung out in the stands with an ipod reliving my childhood and watching deity_inc unsurprisingly own the field & everybody on it—gracia’s rendition of “prince igor" made a particularly fitting score. after that we went down to the sound, climbed on the rocks a bit, watched from a safe distance as goofy young people sang tuneless pirate songs loudly by huge bonfires, & then went to ray’s to listen to the wine-travels stories of one of their wine-gurus, sample some more grapey goodness (he’ll be appalled), and watch the sunset disappear under purple-grey cloud-tufts reflected in the water:


after that, a little more wine with gabriel, lots more studying with markers that i missed most of (all of which paid off, btw—word came in saturday that he’d passed!), and an earnest attempt at watching the mummy--i failed miserably and had to be sent to bed early, at something like just three seattle-time, which is just six in the morning my-time, long before my host called it a day. & then friday was just long enough for a pop in to his favorite coffee-shop, whose proprietress is a british browncoat—now i understand—before heading to the airport to send me back from whence i came.

there. one story told. many to go. i so deserved mothra. climb on.

on weekends, nobody cares about your gorillapod.

fortunately i've been otherwise engaged rather than sitting around to mope about it. weekend spent mostly diss-revising, bitching about it (on IM, to the cat, to my roommate, to myself...), and doing it anyway, interrupted periodically by bouts of: sleeping, sneaking wee bits of fantasy & historical fiction, going out for korean food w/soonki & sangeethadevi on a guided cultural adventure, drinking (&) coffee w/SK-L & learning about deceit & treachery in fictionalized ancient rome for another, being startled repeatedly by unexpected thunderscraps (which are like thunderstorms, but less concentrated, and sometimes come out of nowhere, and sometimes happen in bright sunlight), walking & dodging slugs on the shiny wet morning streets, stuffing myself silly on quiche & pesto thanks to nellthegreat, & playing text-tag w/deity_inc (the wine overlord) during a dinner party in which: 1 person was talking all about moving to seattle and another one was talking about this guy in college he knew who was called the warlock.

the world, she just keeps on shrinking. or undulating. or something. heh heh. shut up, beavis. mom's cat ate three whole bites of food yesterday--i found this out while sipping honeysuckle at a neighbor's fence--and mom says "call your brother," & yes, that's related.

hey, robotapocalypse, we should have a movie night soon so i can deliver your birthday present, which is hanging out in my car (although it'll probably be moved tomorrow, as i seem to have offered to help total strangers move in to new digs--the hatchback tax, it turns out, is not unlike the truck tax. but it seems to frequently come with offers for free pizza...) & also because crossing the line just isn't as much fun without your (vanguard) company.

t-minus a day before the start of the update-o-rama (gotta get 'em in before i lose my whole crowd to the burn & school starts anyway...)

shit, don't look now: it's going-on-mid-august. the dissertation is still not finished, and now it's syllabus season!

revisions have been ongoing. loathing is, i'm told, a natural part of the process, so i shouldn't worry. much. i have done a lot that i'm not sure is at all valuable, really. i have a lot left to do. if you find me online, i'm likely on the computer because i'm revising. i will likely be easily and gladly distracted, at least for brief stints, but if you ask me how i am, you are likely to hear about the grumpy and the loathing. it might be kinder for everyone involved just not to ask.

new roommate isaac has gone home to kentucky to get married before coming back up here to complete his one year program with frequent visits to and from louisville, where she's got a job, their house, and their dog-and-cat menagerie. wish him & niki luck--it's crazy, what they're doing, but it just might work, & they're the sort of good kids it ought to work for.

for those of you who haven't gotten the update in one medium or another, "syllabus season" means what you think it means, that miracle-upon-miracle, for the first fall in four years i'll be teaching, and because i never have seen the point of doing anything half-assed, i'll be teaching five classes at two schools, plus logging writing center hours at one of them, plus teaching a bonus weekend workshop at the other. suddenly, inexplicably, i find myself about to become a real commuter-adjunct. i'm going to need a smartpass for the toll road, because it's the only half-efficient way between me and where i'm going (and going, and going). but so far i'm really excited about the people i've met that i get to work with and the conversations we've been having about actual pedagogy (gasp) and good handbooks (gasp again), and today my new textbook arrived via ups brown truck, and i was giddy-like-christmas! (he also brought printer-ink, because burny_md is a