Tuesday, February 10, 2009
also
I am hungry and had planned to go out into the world and buy a snack since I have my planning period right now, but it's raining. What to do?
Monday, February 2, 2009
sick day
Right now I'm watching the world go by from my bed, with everything filtered through the leafy oak tree just outside one of my three huge sash windows, which is a nice alternative to the vantage point of my classroom. I came down with some terrible disease over the weekend, so even though I feel much better today, I'm taking it to recover.
According to Dan C., he misses my blog. I miss my blog too. I've just been doing everything at such an intense pace over these past few months that I haven't had so much time for it. But for some weird reason the fact that it's now February makes me feel much better about everything, even though February didn't do so well in my ranking of months. This time around, it seems so manageable: thanks to today, I have this 4-day week, then a single 5-day week, then hopefully D. coming to visit, then a 4-day week in terms of having students (the 16th is professional development), then Mardi Gras and K., then a 2-day week. And March is our last real month of school, what with GEE testing and spring break in April and exams in May. I remember when I thought I wouldn't survive this year, both back in September and yesterday on Saturday in the throes of my illness. I guess I will.
Currently reading Tolstoy's A Confession thanks to D., still pressing through Underworld and Ada, or Ardor, and leafing through an article on competitive Scrabble in the New Yorker from a couple of weeks ago, but probably most importantly reflecting on The Moviegoer since it's Carnival season and I'm in New Orleans. From the narrator's final train of thought before the Epilogue, on a black man he's just seen emerge from church on Ash Wednesday:
"His forehead is an ambiguous sienna color and pied: it is impossible to be sure that he received ashes. When he gets in his Mercury, he does not leave immediately but sits looking down at something on the seat beside him. A sample case? An insurance manual? I watch him closely in the rear-view mirror. It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God's own importunate bonus?
"It is impossible to say."
According to Dan C., he misses my blog. I miss my blog too. I've just been doing everything at such an intense pace over these past few months that I haven't had so much time for it. But for some weird reason the fact that it's now February makes me feel much better about everything, even though February didn't do so well in my ranking of months. This time around, it seems so manageable: thanks to today, I have this 4-day week, then a single 5-day week, then hopefully D. coming to visit, then a 4-day week in terms of having students (the 16th is professional development), then Mardi Gras and K., then a 2-day week. And March is our last real month of school, what with GEE testing and spring break in April and exams in May. I remember when I thought I wouldn't survive this year, both back in September and yesterday on Saturday in the throes of my illness. I guess I will.
Currently reading Tolstoy's A Confession thanks to D., still pressing through Underworld and Ada, or Ardor, and leafing through an article on competitive Scrabble in the New Yorker from a couple of weeks ago, but probably most importantly reflecting on The Moviegoer since it's Carnival season and I'm in New Orleans. From the narrator's final train of thought before the Epilogue, on a black man he's just seen emerge from church on Ash Wednesday:
"His forehead is an ambiguous sienna color and pied: it is impossible to be sure that he received ashes. When he gets in his Mercury, he does not leave immediately but sits looking down at something on the seat beside him. A sample case? An insurance manual? I watch him closely in the rear-view mirror. It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God's own importunate bonus?
"It is impossible to say."
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