Feast or Famine

Tonight the tutoring center is empty. Last night it was crazy--some architecture class had a paper due, so we got an embarrassment of badly written essays about pilasters and emblatures. Who knows what tomorrow will be? Now that the quarter's drawing to a close, the tutor alert level has been raised to Orange and we all have to work extra shifts (next week will be Red). It's a good job, but it makes me tired.

I'm going to talk about this book in one of my final papers. One of the poems, "Bunny Tract," makes me think of Irvine, for obvious reasons.

Primarily by zigzags like a poem,
bunny moves . . . Certainly, bunny
has much figured out . . .
The ancient poet wakes, a bit hungover,
footprints of his friend in new snow
going down the hill, bunny dances
on the edge of the abyss . . .

I miss those days of running down the hill late at night, coming home from D and M's place.

I had some smart things to say about these poems, but then I talked to an ESL student about soil samples for 45 minutes, and during that time my brain floated off somewhere. I hope it's on a beach sipping a fruity drink, or maybe hanging out at a swim-up bar with Sisterkins's brain.

Ooh, I just remembered a new pet peeve: paper prompts that are a whole page long, single spaced, OR LONGER. It takes wizardly concentration powers to read through one of these things, and according to my informal poll, 4 out of 5 dentists prefer to write a paper that doesn't answer the question rather than close-read hundreds of words in which important instructions may be buried. It's no fun at the writing center to slog though the War and Peace of assignments and then tell a student he has to tear down the pilasters and start over. No one should create a need to (as they say at UCI) "unpack the prompt." If you do this, consider yourself scolded.