Rock On

My favorite local band, Shuttle Cock, is playing the Barley Pub in Dover tonight. I think I have a borderline unhealthy obsession with them, but I really can't help wanting to just stand there and bask in the decibels and stare at Nate,uh.. I mean Porky, doing his thing. Don't want to talk to him. Don't want to know him. I just want to watch. I'm a retard.

Spring Break

I didn't just happen to fall into teaching by accident. I was well aware that becoming a teacher would more or less ensure me a lifetime of spring breaks, summer vacations and long holiday recesses. And the other thing is I just always liked school so much that I never really wanted to leave. There was a moment I had as an undergrad in Boulder that has stayed clear in my mind all these years. I was walking on campus, just a little bit off Broadway, across a stone bridge with the library way down the quad in the distance. The leaves were green and it was about 3pm. The sun was still above the Flatirons, sending its long diagonal rays through the branches. I might have been on my way to a creative writing class. I stopped on that little bridge and looked around and wished that somehow, someway I could figure out how to become a university teacher (not necessarily a professor, mind you). Of course, there was nothing I really excelled in enough to ever imagine being able to teach it, but I remember the feeling. Schools make me feel safe and calm, like I'm where I belong. I used to feel the same way up on the 5th floor of Hamilton Library at UH where they keep the Japanese collection.
That wish I made was one of those things I thought would never come true, but it did. Over the years I have noticed something kind of spooky about myself. I have wish power. Whenever I have really wished hard and long for something to come about, generally it has. Maybe I just wish on things that seem a sure bet to begin with. Or maybe I just wish powerfully.

Uhhhh....

I guess it's not a good thing when the boss sends out a note that announces the department must make a 20% cut in non-tenured staff and you happen to be non-tenured staff. Wonder if I'm going to have more free time next year than I counted on having. (And less income.)
It would be nice if my horoscope were right just this once. Here's what Jonathon Cainer had to say today:

If you have a comfortable, weatherproof environment, what does it matter how hard it rains? Only if your protection looks likely to let the elements in, is there a need to worry. Think of yourself now as fundamentally safe and sound. The worst a passing storm can do is enter through a small hole in your roof and spoil one tiny area of an otherwise comfortable room. Better to put up with this philosophically than to climb outside to cover the gap and end up drenched!

Yeah, hope it means something.

Bass Player Jokes

Q. What do you call a bass player on the front porch?
A. The pizza delivery guy
Want more? Go here.

Dreaming of Spring

I see poetry popping up in blogs all over the place these days. Maybe it's a sign of spring. Here's my crocus to add to the bunch.

I have hours. everything's okay.
It's a beautiful day.
It's a beautiful day.

Got no worries.
Free from flurries of all kinds.
And there's nothing I'm looking to find.
No one I'm trying to bind
or blind today.

So I'll wind on my way
to play away the day.
Come what may.

Why Thank You

I got carded buying beer at the grocery store tonight. That hasn't happened to me in a couple of years. I could have children who are legally old enough to drink. I get too much of a kick out of it.

Sunday is Mud Day

Out the door and down the street, past the towering compost piles and straight on back into the woods. Keep going. Take a left when you get to the spot where there used to be a fork in a log in the road until my nephew removed it like Arthur two summers ago. Through the woods, up the hill, down across the fields, to the trail in the woods along the river. Splish, splash. Splish, splish, splish, jingle, jingle. Panny circles like a satellite. It's not hard to be the center of a dog's universe. He frolics. I trudge. Splish, splash.

Letters are Commonplace

Letters are commonplace enough, yet what splendid things they are! When someone is in a distant province and one is worried about him, and then a letter suddenly arrives, it is as though one were seeing him face to face. Again, it is a great comfort to have expressed one's feelings in a letter even though one knows it cannot yet have arrived. If letters did not exist, what dark depressions would come over one! When one has been worrying about something and wants to tell a certain person about it, what a relief it is to put it all down in a letter! Still greater is one's joy when a reply arrives. At that moment a letter really seems like an elixir of life.
-- from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, circa late 900s. Translation by Ivan Morris.