Conversation of the day

At a campus convenience store:

Me: Sorry this $10 bill is a little ripped.

Guy at the counter: That's okay. I can understand why someone would have rage against Hamilton.

Me: I know! He's the one who got us into this mess!

Also, Josh pointed me toward this amazing tidbit for NPR junkies.

Teaching

So I have been trawling Flickr today, and one of the amusing but frustrating fruits of my labors has been the discovery that this is the first image that comes up when you search for "teaching." Of course! Who wouldn't want to illustrate some text about teaching with an image of a tender avian moment involving worms?

Strange Life

Damn you, Mr. President and the adorable and needy children of the United States, you now have my $642.

Today when I got home from school my apartment was unexpectedly wrapped in plastic and some people were cutting a hole in my bathroom wall. I was planning to practice the cello, but even though that didn't happen, I felt on during orchestra rehearsal and it was exhilarating. I always wonder these days why I didn't think more in high school how physically intense orchestra playing is--it's exhausting, and also sometimes a big high. We are playing a great program with all these very Eastern European pieces on it that stay in your head and make you feel like doing a gypsyish dance all the time. I am writing a program note for this concert, on Dvorak's Symphonic Variations, and I'm excited about that, too, and keep pondering what I'm going to say.

I'm also making delicious potato salad. The potatoes are in the freezer, and I must rescue them soon.

Tomorrow I have to give a lecture in Construction Management. My life is strange.

Anger

Doing my taxes tonight I discovered that the test-prep teaching company I was fired from almost a year ago (for being insufficiently devoted to the cause, not wanting to give up every weekend day forever, etc) is continuing to screw me over by calling me a "nonemployee" for tax purposes. That means, technically (I now know thanks to H&R Block), that I am a business owner, and that means I have to pay a big whopping tax on a very small amount of income.

Of course, looking at the tax stuff more carefully, I discovered that out of the 10 or so criteria for having a "nonemployee," the only one that my company met was that they didn't give me any benefits (everything else clearly pointed to a normal employee arrangement). But I'm pretty sure that this status was in my contract, so there's probably not much I can do. Except destroy them with my own test prep business!

Comforting myself, because, while the situation seems a little ambiguous and I really don't want to pay a big tax when I was expecting to get a refund, it's against my morals to be a tax cheat, I thought . . . at least I'm giving it to OBAMA! It really is nice to know that my taxes might not go straight to Halliburton but instead could be used to provide, say, $642 worth of picture books for adorable children. That's what I'm going to think about.

Poetry update

One of my post-exam goals is to try to take a couple of weeks to do some serious poetry-work before getting deep into my dissertation. I can't believe this, but it's been over a year since I've sent out submissions, so it's time to get out the ol' SASE operation again.

I'm also trying to figure out how to get beyond the one-poem-at-a-time paradigm, and after literally years of having no idea how to transform my (ever-growing and increasingly-unwieldy) pile of poems into a manuscript with shape, today I decided to take the empirical approach. So I sat down with all the print-outs of poems I could find, and just started sorting. At first, there was no principle other than what felt right. Pretty quickly I realized that I was making sections with a nice combination of direct and oblique approaches to a recognizable (I hope) general theme. I don't know if it would feel that way to anyone other than me, but it was kind of exciting still to feel a larger work taking shape. I was kind of surprised, too, at what the sections turned out to be. The working headings (not to be part of the book itself) are a funny mismatch of different kinds of topics:

1. History
2. Family
3. Boats
4. China
5. Evil
6. California

Spring fever

Hi again. Anyone who might still be reading this, I'm sorry about disappearing. I think I'm back now. It's felt like a long, disorienting hibernation.

All last week and this weekend I was sick. I barely left the house except to teach and go to Petco for cat toys, read two mystery novels, ate popsicles, and tried to be patient and rest and trust that I was building up strength to use when I became human again. I think it worked.

So while I was sick, I did not take stock or reflect on anything. But now I have a few things to say, including . . . I passed my exams. I think I could have answered the questions with interpretive dances and still passed, but still being done feels more momentous than I expected. Everything feels new and different, like anything could happen, like I've slipped an anchor. It's both freeing and alarming. If I don't paddle, I'm just going to drift, but if I do paddle, I might get somewhere.

Today the weather, which had been rainy and snowy, finally turned balmily springlike, and I thought about how I used to have spring fever when I was in high school, how I would get these feelings of longing and excitement and melancholy and would daydream about the future and of course, those daydreams never included still having the same feeling half a lifetime later. It's funny how you think it's you, when it's just a condition of the season.