I am large, I contain multitudes

I haven't posted in a week, and yet here I am in the library with hardly a thought in my head. Let's see.

I had a political argument this morning, the kind you can only have with a seventeen-year-old who has the makings of a good little proto-liberal, but who is also ornery as a goat and will argue whatever he thinks is the opposite of your position. It was great, and I realized that it was the first time in years I had had a substantive discussion about politics where the end point wasn't a foregone conclusion. All my peers are disillusioned and our disagreements are minor and generally concern distributing blame or creating hierarchies of impossible dreams. My interaction with people I disagree with, on the other hand, usually involves yelling at the car radio. It's a rare, rare thing to talk to someone whose mind is actually not made up, and it's especially fun if that person is quick on his feet and likes to think. (My student had, in fact, just told me that his favorite movie is "What the Bleep Do We Know," which sounds pretty intellectual, though it was supposed to be terrible, right?) He was pretty good, and I had to work to keep demolishing the idea that it was a good idea to go to war in Iraq.

Then I went to my own seminar, and vehemently argued that we shouldn't use teaching to advance our political agendas. Which is absolutely true.

Now I'm going to pick up some books about Leonard and Virginia Woolf's careers as publishers, and then go to the gym and decide whether to believe the New York Times when it says it's okay to run on a sore ligament.

California friends, I will see you one week from today!