Still okay!

First of all, good news on the academic front--I'm developing an intense adoration for one of my professors. I loved one of my professors last quarter too, and I think that class had a stealthy influence that will stay with me for a long time, but it wasn't a blow-your-mind, oh-this-is-what-I-could-aspire-to-be! kind of experience, which this might be. When I really gave her my heart was when she said "You should all--maybe not now, but someday--think about writing for a larger audience, because that's very important," and the florescent light started buzzing "Hallelujah."

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Earlier today I started Julius Caesar with my high school student. I'm really excited to teach Shakespeare, although I haven't read this particular play. My plan is that we will read it together, according to the following formula: Elizabethan language=no lesson planning for a month. Brilliant, huh? Thank you, intervening centuries.

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Soon I'm going to a meeting of my writing group. It's great--all we do is sit there and write, in this really cute local bookstore and cafe.

At these meetings, I've been working on an essay that deals among other things with the topic of rational and irrational fears, which is especially interesting to me as I've been readjusting to living in my apartment post-break-in. What makes a fear "rational"? A fear becomes more justified, but not necessarily less of a problem, when the feared event becomes more likely. The thing that is really fascinating me about this right now is that whatever the details, the basic possibilities that underlie fear--you will suffer, you will lose everything, you will die--are all in fact absolute certainties. If fear becomes "rational" when the feared outcome is likely, then constant abject terror is absolutely rational. And yet, in the course of things I spend much more time sleepy or irritable or gleeful than I do afraid.