Tiny, five hour fictions.

You can tell yourself you're going to catch up on your grading, because after all, you have five uninterrupted solitary hours at home in the evening.

You can tell yourself that you can also do the laundry whilst catching up on your grading.

You can tell yourself you've got time to do a little light editing of your manuscript. Also, that you can go get it printed and put it in the mail.

You can tell yourself that changing the linens on the bed is a ten minute job. Fifteen, tops.

But you can't make five uninterrupted solitary hours do all that. You just can't, no matter how many stories you tell yourself about "uninterrupted" and "solitary" and even "five."

That is all.

Long day in high heels.

. . . but a good day. We celebrated the new issue of Folio, our student literary and arts publication. I am on a predictable high after a predictable era of mounting anxiety. We had tons and tons of students submit, published more work than we've been able to before (at least since I've been the faculty advisor), and have a new website with web-exclusive stuff. Overwhelming, the good stuff. This is why being a teacher is a great job--because you get to see these students make something amazing happen.

oh gush gush gush gush gush GOSH. But I dressed up for the event, including wearing high heeled boots, which were just fine till around 4 p.m. when I realized that, predictably, my feet were tired of being high heeled. Anyway, the event, which started at 6 but really started at 6:20, ended at about 8, with us getting home around 8:45. Whoa. That is a lot of high heeling.

Why high heels, you ask? Because, I answer. Because: Folio. Folio is worth dressing up for. And having hurty feet for.

In other news: I have now tried to order Watermark, a book of prose poems about Venice by Joseph Brodsky, for the third time. The first two times I ordered a used but in good condition copy from two different Amazon Marketplace booksellers. Each time, I got an e-mail a day later saying, Whoops, so sorry, we're out of that book. And I was all, well why'd you say you had one, then? Just because the New York Times travel section mentioned it on Sunday in an article about going to Venice in the wintertime which I totally want to do and so, apparently, does everyone else in the bookbuying universe. Anyway, it's a dirty plot to make me buy a new copy from Amazon. Which I did. Today. Hopefully this order will stick.

In other other news: For those of you watching the mole poblano situation closely, there is a mole update, if not much of one. This morning before work, I went to the Mexican grocery store. They had ancho, pasilla, and mulato chiles. So I bought them. Also, regarding the family dinner that the mole poblano is a part of: I lied to myself today, saying, "When I get home I will make the tres leches cake and also the pumpkin flan! It won't matter that it will be after the Folio reading and I will have hurty feet and also won't feel like making two desserts anyway, not to mention tearing up chiles, frying them, and soaking them. No! I will be making cake and flan!" So now I'm telling myself another lie about how I will get up early early to make a tres leches cake and pumpkin flan and fry the chiles etc., even though probably I will get up at 8, as usual. And yawn around for a minute or an hour. Why? Because: Folio. Folio is worth sleeping in and yawning around for.

Lies I tell myself: a running list.

1. I'll get caught up over the weekend.

2. I'll get caught up over the long weekend.

3. That's the last thing I'm going to buy.

4. That's the last potato chip I'm ever eating.

5. There, that's all tidy. I'm never to let it get that bad again.

6. Just five more minutes online, and then I'm going to [fill in the blank: take a walk; do the dishes; grade an online discussion; organize my sock drawer . . . ]

7. Starting now, I'm going to write everyday. [write = not the millions of words I generate a day; write = something that might eventually be a poem]

8. (at midnight) That's all right, I can get all of this done tomorrow.

Very good.

In a document I call "Daily Writing," I had this to say about today:

sweaty shopping excursion, ugh
after all that bravado, feeling: RELUCTANT to start anew on the terrifying poem.

(Re the sweaty shopping: because I started to feel sweaty, I failed to buy a beautiful scarf that I am totally regretting at the moment. I hope no one else bought it before I get there tomorrow at 10 a.m., sharp, to snag it myself.)

But: back to the tedious story of me writing.

1. I got out my fat freewrite re terrifying poem.
2. I got out my ancillary notes on my fat freewrite.
3. I went shopping.
4. I took a shower to wash off the shopping sweat.
5. I ate my lunch.
6. I looked at my freewrites and ancillary notes. I took some more notes.
7. Exhausted from all the getting out and the looking and the note-taking, I lay down and finished my French detective novel.
8. I sleep-wrote.
9. I got up, slightly disgusted with myself for the self-delusional "sleep-writing" nonsense I was shoveling.
10. I WROTE A FRESH, FULL DRAFT OF THE TERRIFYING POEM.

Wrote and cried, cried and wrote. When he got home, the historian asked, "Are you okay?" I told him about the crying and writing. He said, "Yeah, you look like you've just been crying." I told him I had just finished the tear-stained draft.

And today, the writing--all of it--was very, very good.