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Part of my problem is that I really like to cook but I have for some reason become shy about cooking for other people, so I end up making these elaborate multi-course meals for myself. Tonight I made tomato-lentil soup, which was good even though I added newly-opened wine before discovering it was corked; collard greens with mushrooms and sugar snap peas; and whole-wheat molasses bread. Before cooking I did my usual 5-mile run around Greenlake in the unusual cold, and watched the three twilights diminish and the stars come out.

It’s a good thing to rise and fall without volition,
and another to be infused with a pale white light and touch all equally.

Bicoastal

I'm back in Seattle and feeling very bicoastal. Coming back from the airport last night, I was thinking about how familiar the view as you enter the city has become to me. I remember the first time I saw Seattle, in March of 2002. My first view as the same one, driving north into the downtown, but then it was daytime and what's now everyday was then new and spectacular. (And that night we played pool at the College Inn, where I now go every single Thursday night and the bartenders know my name.)

Now I'm on the couch in my office reading interesting things about Ezra Pound, having decided not to leave my paper till the last minute (although many people would consider this the last minute) and the cat is sleeping on me. So this feels like home. But New York also feels like home. That's odd, since I've never lived there and don't even know my way around very well, but so many people I love are there that it just seems natural for me to be there too. It was a really good trip. More on that soon.

It's 9:00 am in Seattle, and if I were there I would be reading Ezra Pound in preparation for class in a couple of hours. Actually, I would probably still be in bed, recovering from my 7-midnight tutoring shift the night before, and the cat would be making the international sign for "breakfast" (tapping on face with paw).

So I have been sick, and am only queasily back on solid food since last night. And I have discovered that basically not leaving one's apartment for three days has strange effects on one. I've been slowly working through my first big stack of student papers and discovering that though I've always hated grading it's not the commenting that I mind so much, or even the reflection of my own poor teaching that I see staring back at me from each page, but the feeling of desperation and hurry. So I'm trying to plod my way through and not be faced at midnight with several hundred pages still to go.

Anyway, back to the strange effects: I looked up to see my cat on the windowsill, and then at my hands clutching the paper of the moment ("Ignorance in America") and my pink grading pen, and suddenly felt this incredible thankfulness about having opposable thumbs. The cat must be so jealous! To all the early hominids who took the initiative to find slightly handier-than-usual mates, and so on--thank you.

Also, I know it's ridiculous, but I feel personally outraged by the early darkness. How could anyone have decided it would be okay for the sun to set at 4:30. Huh? Huh, sun? I don't mind (much) the cold and bluster, but the dark I really hate. Night is fine when it comes at nighttime, but at this hour it seems, and I really mean this in the most literal way, it seems evil. Malicious, and promising the advent of very bad times. Also, I think the early dark, as well as the sickness-induced time for contemplation, has been bringing back memories of a year ago at this time. I got a flash of the feeling of that time earlier today as I was playing my guitar for the first time in a while, and it surprised me. A year ago I was unhappy, I was really miserable all fall, but it wasn't as depressive as the unhappiness that set in later in the year. This is a weird word but it's the one that came instantly to mind--I felt powerful. It was a kind of edgy, out-of-control manic energy, and when I think back, I was a little nuts in the fall. I was working out kind of obsessively and feeling everything super intensely but feeling things also, paradoxically, with a kind of fierce detachment. In retrospect, I think I must have been on a kind of adrenaline high for those few months. I think it was how I dealt with having to destroy the happy life I had before I moved, little by little, every day. I almost don't know the person I was then anymore, which is a weird thought and a sad one. Now I feel much more like myself again, which is good. I've always hated the winter dark.

This moment of introspection brought to you by procrastination and Proust and by the hope that anyone nice enough to bother reading a long post about nothing will also be inclined to forgive the solipsism (par for the course anyway) and the psychobabble.

Paws in the face

Photo of the day

Pitch dark at 5:00

Have I mentioned that daylight savings is my least favorite holiday? Though I have to say that dark, rainy norhern living has its pleasures, too--today I skipped my office hours and read Proust in bed (where it was written, after all!) for several hours while the cat napped on my legs. It was lovely.

I'm ready to be less busy. This is probably my easiest week all quarter, and still tomorrow I have a midterm and my class is being observed.

I have this feeling that I actually had something to say when I started writing this, but whatever it is has escaped me now. The cat and I miss Aunt Jane.

Information

I discovered last night that the UW has a School of Information. Great! We also have a Library of Books and a Fountain of Moving Water. As well as a Food Court of Food.

Apparently, the information dispensed at the School of Information does not include the correct names for grammatical concepts. I think it's funny when people are grammatical sticklers without having much grammatical knowledge themselves (I would have to sheepishly put myself in this category), but it's hard on students when, for instance, they get dinged for passive voice and are told to come into the writing center but there is actually no passive voice at all in the essay. I spent a good while puzzling over this last night, until the student explained to me that "passive voice" included constructions like "I was thinking" instead of "I thought."

And this is all well and good and no big deal, except that the student prefaced our whole conference by saying he was a terrible writer--which was not at all true--and I just felt bad. But we were able to clear everything up and he's gonna be fine.

Confidential to U.J.: check your email! And please refer any questions to the nearest niece.

Sisterkins and Catkins

The cat LOVES his Aunt Jane. He has never taken to anyone else like this.

Sisterkins also makes a killer apple pie, co-throws a great dinner party, and can do a full shopping trip through a very crowded Trader Joe's in under 10 minutes flat.

In other news, I now have a TG plane ticket! I'll be in New York from Tuesday 11/20 to Saturday 11/24.

Half Sight of Mountain

On Friday I took a 9-mile walk to and around a park by Lake Washington, where I could see Mt. Rainier and the harvest moon rising. I got a lot done while walking, as I usually do, and was happy. I wish I could have that peace back now.

Update: I just revised a poem about the Donner Party and now I feel much better. It's a weird life, this being a 'poet.'

Have you ever?

Have you ever, in the middle of the city, been awakened at 4 am by the insistent sound of a rooster crowing, and then, half-asleep, listened to it for the next two hours, by your watch, and yet been unsure in the cold light of day, despite the presence in your head of the inevitable Bob Dylan song, of whether the whole thing really happened at all? I kept asking myself today why I was so tired, and then saying to myself, "Oh yeah, the rooster!"

Crazy Old Uncle Ezra

Could someone please explain to me what could possibly be the point of reading Pound's Cantos if you're just going to shake your head in exasperated superiority every time the poem does something you don't understand?

Spaghetti squash with sage and parmesan, parsnips with onions, and chickpeas, spinach salad. "Ethical Joyce." Lots of discussions about the ethics of reading in general. Awkward lunches and dinners with eminent visitor and my awkward professors and colleagues. Conferences. Today I gave a presentation about an assignment from 39B, a process I described as "exorcising a demon." Rediscovering just how great Proust is as a book-on-tape, listened while I cooked, very caught up now in Swann, Odette and the rest of them. Kitcat is caught up in the study of the motion of a ball with a bell inside when swatted with paw, though right now he is working on his practicum in lapbound purring.

As I was lying here typing Kitcat was falling asleep curled up next to me and before he fell asleep entirely he reached out and took my hand with his paw.

I really hate the word limn.

I have to go to bed but if I do it will immediately be morning and I will have to have eight student conferences before I'm fully awake, and then study Pound, and then Joyce, and go out to dinner with our bigtime visiting scholar, and then write a paper, and then go to sleep only to get up and do it all over again. At moments like this Sisterkins and I sometimes imagine we are at a beach resort with a swim-up bar. Wouldn't that be nice?

I'm thinking about just getting in my car and driving out of the city for a little while. Of course, I will have to bring Proust, Joyce, Pound, and 22 student essays. My kitcat looks like a little dragon when he's sleeping.

car etiquette

Maybe I'm crazy or I lived in California for too long, but I feel like there are rules of car etiquette that are pretty clear cut. AND that late at night in a neighborhood where there are muggings, these rules would be observed with particular devotion. For instance . . .

1) If you are giving someone a ride, you insist on taking them to their door; even if they politely offer to walk, you go five minutes out of your way rather than letting them off by the side of the highway. Right?

2) If you and your boyfriend are already giving someone a ride home, and you happen to walk out of the bar with another person you know and have been hanging out with, you don't all walk together for five minutes and then say, mid-sentence, "Well, here's the car!" and pile in without a backward look. I mean, as the kids say, wtf?

Office

I'm so happy: I cleared out the avalanche and now I have an office with my own desk and a whole bunch of shelves and a printer and a huge window with tons of light and a nice tree. And four fun officemates, who, so far, are there when I want to hang out and gone when I want to work quietly, as I just did, finally finishing 3 out of the 4 public health profiles I have to write. (They are due today, so I have to go home, where my notes are, and finish the last one.)

Solipsistic schedule report

Woke up, finished up some lesson planning, rewrote portions of a paper, and left the house around 10:00.

Studied for my Proust quiz (using the English translation, to save time) while walking to school.

Photocopied for class.

Taught from 10:30-12:20.

Went to Proust class from 12:30-2:20 (It's an undergrad class with a professor who doesn't do discussions, which I'm kind of loving . . . except for the quiz, this was an entirely passive two hours)

Went to my office and discovered that the previous inmate has still not cleared out the avalanche of papers he left under my desk; on the plus side, he has also left his tree.

Finished my paper and did the reading for my pedagogy class.

Went to pedagogy class from 3:30-5:20.

Walked home. Fed and pet the cat. Repacked my bag with homework for tomorrow.

Walked back to school.

Tutored from 7:00 to midnight. It was incredibly busy so I literally did not take a break during those five hours.

Took the shuttle home so as not to be robbed and/or killed during the walk.

Had a bowl of oatmeal (late dinner--I really need to go shopping).

Now I have to read 80 pages of the Cantos by 10:00 tomorrow. I so wish I were kidding.

My Articulate Friends

Ever since I didn't get around to getting rid of my reluctantly created facebook account, I've been slowly collecting friends. I'm not very close with most of them, but my stalkerish side has discovered that it's still fun to find out what they're doing via the "friend update" feature, wherein, for those of you who are behind the times in your social networking knowledge, people fill in whatever they want and it appears on their friends' "News Feed" in a format like "Sarah Ann Stove is . . . not getting very much sleep these days," or whatever.

The three latest updates inform me, and I quote, that:

Friend 1 is aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!

Friend 2 is blah, blah, pooped, rrrrrmm!

Friend 3 is AAAAAAAUGHH!!!

It's so great to stay in touch.

More About the Cat

Kit has been accused in some quarters of not being a lap cat. This is so not true. But it's hard to get photo-evidence of this, because the act of taking pictures gets him into curious mode, and then he won't sit still. But anyway, here's one of us both crashed out on The New Yorker. I also took a whole series of me getting groomed, but they're all a little blurry.

Readings

I just spent a very pleasant hour reading "The Singularity of Literature" in the bathtub. The professor didn't bother to order it, so I was reading a printout of my very first ebook: hello, future! My cat likes water and has jumped in the tub a couple of times, but tonight he stayed dry.

Here is my Proust professor's summary of "Into the Wild" (he was talking about the movie, which I haven't seen, but I have read and been disturbed by the book): "He goes to Alaska, eats the wrong potato, gets on a bus, and then . . . we know what happens to people in books!" I think the whole class was totally mystified, but, knowing what he was talking about, I thought it was kind of hilarious.

Now maybe I'll read some Pound in bed. Or maybe on the couch.