Some Facts About Right Now

There are eight empty water or coffee glasses scattered around my room

I'm excited to teach Hunter S Thompson tomorrow

I don't even know why I write poems

I hope it rains again tomorrow

Today I spent six hours trying to go running and never went

The plant on my desk has almost doubled in height in the past couple of weeks

I'm going through a crossword puzzle phase

I'm quietly in a panic about next year and the rest of my life

I can't help wondering why Milton doesn't just say what he means

I'm sorry I bailed on karaoke tonight

I may not be low-maintenance after all

Doonesbury is genius

Hen and I are going to Austin in a week and one day

March starts tomorrow and I have no idea what it will bring

Stability is very scary and very alluring

I like to IM

Obligations stress me out way beyond reason

I'm really grateful for the people around me

Everyone should have a stuffed animal

I Still Like Reading

After getting more bad news yesterday, I decided to deal in my time-honored way: with a binge read. I have now finished the Da Vinci Code. It was actually pretty good--the writing was not-bad enough that it was possible to concentrate on the plot which has a formulaic but still in-its-way lovely intricacy. Still, main characters should, in my view, only wince once or twice a book, otherwise you have a tic on your hands and other characters are sure to notice.

Also, I am LOVING literary journalism. Not that I'm eager to grade the stack of papers in my bag, but the process of talking about passages in articles with my class, and describing the way that the authors create their various complexities, is really fun. Since I tend to discover what's amazing in the articles while I'm talking about them to the class, rather than in advance so that I can construct thoughtful activities to lead the students to them, it's not a teaching high as much as a reading high, but it's still pretty great--and if I teach the class again, I now understand what it's important to point out, and could do it more pedagogically. Maybe it's so fun because I'm learning along with the students, whereas in poetry I've been so far ahead of them that the subject matter itself seemed more static, and what was interesting came from figuring out how to convey it.

It doesn't change

A kid after auditioning for a role in "The Lion King":

"It's bad because if you don't get the part you'll be crying.... I'm going to go home and practice, practice, practice, so I can get the part next time....maybe."

School rejection #1 today.

Rock

It's been a week of many readings and of only a small amount of motivation. Still, Geoffrey Wolff is a funny man. Catherine Barnett is awesome. Our professors are good people, and so are our classmates. This is a totally inane thing to be typing, but I'm in a bit of a fog and probably getting sick, so there you go.

Also, Faultline is going to rock.

Torino Here We Come

I admit it, while grading I watched some figure skating. And it was ..... boring. All the programs look alike, they're totally unmusical, and the fancy stuff isn't fun to watch except for the drama of who will fall down. In practice, I saw them do some single jumps, and they are so much prettier and more graceful than the triple ones. I mean, if it's purely technical, why wear a tutu?

Despite my jadedness, though, I would like to report that I like Irina Slutskaya for her name and the fact that she wears pants, and Sasha Cohen, of course, also for the name. (I also like that she looks like Summer from the OC.)

Now, more grading!

Frogs Etc.

I would just like to say that my sister is the best. She and Uncle John are lucky to be hanging out together in China. But Uncle John, are you secretly a Frogman? Be careful of the soup--it may be full of your cousins!

I am slowly slogging through a stack of student essays--the only boring reading of the term, hopefully, because other than these it will be their articles which have to be written to captivate--and after that I will transcribe my own boring interview. Work, work, work. In theory it's great, but in practice it's so much easier to fool around on the internet. Right now I really want a small, cute typewriter to write poems on. It's not so much that I feel blocked, because I'm writing okay on my computer, I just think it would be fun to put the paper in, tap tap tap, and a poem comes out the other side.

Speaking of tap tap tap, it's time now to run my little heart out on the treadmill.

The Berenstein Bears and Too Many Boys

In which Sister emerges from serial monogamy to discover that when it rains it pours on the sunny dirt road deep in bear country.

Poem Revelation

I'm doing something I never thought I would ever do: writing without punctuation. So far, I think it's exactly what I need to do. In fact, maybe I can attribute all my problems in life to overly-restricted syntax. Please let this be true.

Ding dong, the witch is dead...

Or at least, Valentines' Day is over. I was actually truly not bitter yesterday, for once, but I think Hallmark might have indirectly contributed to my sluggishness. The thing is, I think it's really better to be single on V-day, because you don't have to decide how much to try to fit yourself into a ridiculous cliche. My last coupled Valentines' day was a disaster: we kept drinking scorpion bowls and arguing, and it's really hard to argue in a dignified manner when you're sipping from one of two straws stuck in a pineapple.

Tomorrow is a much better holiday, HenHen's birthday. You should come to her party on Friday.

On a totally unrelated note, I've made an odd, faintly embarassing, discovery: I like off-brand diet soda better than Diet Coke--to me, it tastes more sugary, more like real coke. Isn't that weird? Why is that?

Slug

I am a slug. I can't bring myself to leave my room today. I skipped class. I skipped everything. And I haven't even been productive within my room. Right after this, though, I will go run on the treadmill until I feel sick, and then I will grade 8,000 student papers. Really.

The thing is, 1) I'm really lazy, but 2) I'm waiting for news of schools and I guess it's gotten a little obsessive because I don't like to be away from any of the possible modes of communication.

In San Francisco

I just did something very impulsive, something I really thought I would never do until about half an hour before I did it. The city air, man, it can make you crazy! More on this later, maybe.

A poem about last night and this morning

Karaoke
Made me choky
When I taught
About plot

Accidental Sonneteer

Abby assigned me to write a poem in blank verse and I totally just wrote an accidental sonnet. After I had finished the draft I realized it was 14 lines and had a complete reversal in the last couplet. I'm going to chalk this up to having internalized the form, and I'm officially going to consider that pretty neat.

(The poem itself, who knows? It also had to be historical and traumatic, and it's about the Donner party and upsets me. It's also about Milton and a conversation I had with my mom last night, but only I know that.)

Plan

If nothing I've applied for next year comes through, I'm going to go volunteer on Midway Atoll. It sounds awesome. They fly you out to the middle of the Pacific and you have to lift things and count birds all day. Also, left over from the Naval base days, they have a bowling alley!

Friend Crush

Appropos of nothing in particular I was thinking in the shower about friend crushes, and how nice they are, and how they differ from romantic crushes, which are less nice. When you have a romantic crush, you crave the crushee's attention, and simultaneously you get shy and have to fight the urge to hide from the crushee.* With a friend crush, it's just nice to spend time with the person. It's not complicated. But the great thing about any kind of crush, its defining feature I think, is that the crushee's life opens up as a whole alternate set of experiences, thoughts, tastes, etc, so that suddenly it's like you could have twice as much of life if you could get to know this person better. It's a mysterious kind of arithmatic, and it usually doesn't kick in even with people who are really great. But when it does!

*at least if for you you read me

February

Happy new month! How did it get to be February so quickly? Why is it 70 degrees outside?

I'm just procrastinating going to class right now, where my students are going to have to imitate "Slouching Toward Bethleham," but about Irvine. I'm planning to be amused.

I wrote a poem about the bizarro MFA trip to Laughlin, NV. Obviously, location is on my mind right now, probably since I haven't left Orange County in about six years, it feels like.