28 Toed Poems

Read them!

Knut

Ha Ha

Writing my paper paper

I've never been so happy to lose an hour of sleep (ha! more like an hour of work). Sunset at 7:09 this evening! Finally northern living might start to pay off.

For one of my papers I've been reading about something called "theory theory." It makes sense and all, but I still giggle every time I read a phrase like "Proponents of theory theory believe that . . . " I can't shake the impulse to read the second theory as just there for emphasis. It reminds me of the woman I used to work whose marriage left her with the name Dudley Dudley. Thinking about her always cheers me up . . . and what if Dudley Dudley was a propoent of theory theory? Oh, the delight!

Wallow

After the amazing weather of the past couple of days, it got gross again today and I'm inclined to wallow. At least coffee shops with their tiny lanterns exist to make the gloom more tolerable. It's full-speed-ahead time for the papers, except that in a little while I'm going to go have a couple of drinks at grad pub and then go on to take in the tutoring center's three busiest hours of the quarter.

Spring comes to Seattle

You might like to know that right now we're in the middle of nautical twilight. Civil twilight ended about twenty minutes ago, and in about fifteen minutes astronomical twilight will begin. I like knowing these things. Here in Seattle, the sun sets 3 minutes and 26 seconds later every day (except for next weekend, when it will leap over a whole hour). Tonight sunset was at 6:03, and if I hadn't been in a good mood from a day of sun-warmed blossom-scented air, I might have cried. After two days of spring, I don't want to wake up and find it raining, but the rest of the week is supposed to be back to the old northwest ways.

Still, the lousy weather does make you appreciate a change in atmosphere. Unlike in Irvine, where everyone's blase about the weather and people aren't very quirky, on campus today the undergrads were sprawled everywhere with their guitars and their tightropes and their juggling. Before that I went for my new favorite outside run and ran kind of fast, plus I'm excited and optimistic about my papers. So obviously, between the weather, the sun, the exercise, the "energy" vitamin water, and the latte and friendliness at one of my local coffee shops, my mood has broken the glass ceiling. I'm sure it will return to the mailroom soon enough, but for now it's in the executive suite.

Or as I was about to type, the Executive Sweet.

Magical thinking

I have been unusually superstitious lately.

Intervention

I'm in the bar, writing, which is exactly right except that I'm writing a paper instead of poems. And remembering how it's in fact impossible to say anything new about poetry, since poets are the most verbose people ever. People in my class like to use the term "intervention," as if literary analysis has been in a cult and now all its friends and family are gathered together in your article to try and make it see reason. I don't want to make an intervention, I just want to write about potato chips.

In less than two weeks I'll be singing rounds with Henhen, but only if we feel like it.