Before 2016, much of my car-time involved taking a girl or two to an activity. For me relaxing in the car means talking about whatever’s on my mind. Or her mind, or whomever else’s mind. My nest is empty; no one’s in my car. But my musing doesn’t quit just because of that. So now you’re the one “Driving With Daughters!”
I am sitting in my startlingly balmy backyard: breezes ringing the chimes next door, sunlight dappling green (my favorite). It’s the end of my first week of our koine Greek intensive (as opposed to Classical Greek, think Homer), and I’m trying to figure out how to take good care of myself so I can sustain […]
I am pacing the floor: as in, walking from the counter by the microwave to the wall with the space-heater on it, just beyond the king-sized bed. A half-dozen, a dozen times (how do you count a lap?), and my brain only now forms sentences. I am watching the sun set out of the no-longer-bright-blue […]
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other. The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and […]
[dateline: Thursday, 23 May] …so as I have breakfast and get ready to drop My Sweetie at the rent-car agency, I’m reading Fine Cooking. (The post title refers to my last paper of the semester, an annotated bibliography where each annotation is to be eight-ish sentences. I still haven’t collected all the books. It’s due […]
I’m on the quick-hop flight from Austin to Houston: toss the plane in the air, spend maybe thirty minutes at altitude, and drop back down. So we’re already descending as I look at the “ground” of puffy stretched cotton balls as far as my horizontal vision can see. “Cumulus,” I think. “Not doing anything for […]
(in response to my earlier post “focus too narrow? focus too wide? “) Packing my lunch takes 5 minutes, which isn’t actually much. Not long enough to be telling myself, “I don’t have time to bring my lunch.” (I timed it, while heating my leftover coffee: 3x coffee-heating-time.) Mowing the backyard now takes 30 minutes. […]
I’m reasonably certain I’ve been distracting myself from the assigned work at hand. Facebook is a known and appropriate culprit for this. At the same time, much of what I do on Facebook is read articles that I wouldn’t spend time tracking down on the wider interwebs. When I browse tangible libraries, I don’t start […]
I’m reading Holy the Firm for class this morning. It’s an unusually early morning for me, and I may finish the book by 8am, the time I’m usually just opening up my brain. It was first published in 1977, which I can see in its language. And still one of the threads in it is […]
I’m hitting the semester-point where my mind keeps skiving off toward other* pastures while returning to ruminate about the stacks of work at hand. So here’s a similarly disconnected bit. I like to sit, reading, at the kitchen table, folded up like a glove-box map. It’s becoming steadily more clear that this is terrible for […]
One of my classmate-friends turned to me this morning and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in jeans before!” I replied, “I wore these on Sunday, so today’s the day I’m wearing them again—conservation of laundry.” I’ve been a laundry conservationist for a long time. Some of what drives it is what you’d […]
