End times survival guide.

End of the semester, obviously. What did you think I meant?

Actually I'm reading some fairly apocalyptic police procedurals, and my colleagues are having their Zombie Survival Guide event in a couple of days. We're running pretty low on snacks. I'm just saying, the end of the semester might as well be end times, maybe?

No, no, we're going to survive this. Here is my plan:

1. I plan to be caught up. One way to make the grading go better is not to have to dig oneself out a hole of tragic, ungraded work. I am pleased to report that I am altogether caught up (although this is a moment by moment thing, since students are still weaseling late assignments in on Canvas like, oh, late assignment, nbd, Lisa will take it because she's a late assignment taker aka sucker). CHECK.

2. I plan to wear good outfits and comfortable shoes. Good outfits take everything from the "this is bearable" level to the "I will crush this" level. And my new no uncomfortable shoes policy has literally revolutionized my attitude. (Am I overstating? Possibly. But it's almost as if one's baseline well-being radiates out and up from the foot's kajillion tiny little bones and their companionate muscles, tendons, and nerves.)

3. I plan to keep reading fairly apocalyptic police procedurals, as well as any other damn thing I feel like reading.

4. I plan to recognize that no single friend of mine will lose his or her mind if I don't make them a bottle of homemade orange extract or some other thing that requires buying (a) bottles and (b) expensive spirits and (c) worrying that I didn't start the extraction soon enough and (d) other related gift-giving nonsense.

5. I plan to sleep, at least a little more than usual. At this point in the year, shouldn't I be hibernating like a French peasant anyway?

6. I plan to take a walk, to go to the gym, and to be on speaking terms with my dog.

7. I plan to give some of the stuff in my house away. Like books and clothes and food.

8. But above all, I intend to buy more and better snacks. Grading is hungry work.

You guys.

Okay, first of all: first of all, this is the last day of classes, the last day of classes of the semester that almost nigh unto killed me, as in I am almost dead, but I have survived, I have prevailed, I have a new header!

Today, I read the last of the poems and the last of the essays. Today, I met with my independent study students and advised them for the last time. Today, it is the last day. Did I respond to many an e-mail, many a panicky, pleading e-mail? and did I respond with a firm and gentle, not to say severe, not to say way harsh tone? and did I say unto the panicky student, "Panicky student, you must chill. YOU MUST CHILL."?

The answer to all of these questions is yes. Yes, I did. I wore black and I wore shiny shoes, and I was in charge of the last day of school, lo! the last day of school recognized me and surrendered.

Good lord.

Well, the final work doesn't come in till next week, so it's not like I'm done done, but I am done with the meeting with students, and that feels like, the people, a blessed, blessed relief.

Cheers to blessed, blessed relief.

My so-called TV life.

What's that?--you want to know what I watch, week to week, on television? I thought so. Well, I am happy to oblige.

I feel like I'm maybe the only person in the world who still watches TV, as opposed to watching television shows via the internet, and likes it. This makes me feel a little like an old person, but the habit of regular TV watching can be explained: I believe it is due (a) to having come of age when watching TV was your only option, as there was no interweb, and (b) to liking the rhythm of a week being paced, in part, by the show that's on each night, if there is one. (I can feel your horror radiating all the way over here, through the tubes and onto my screen, because of how much TV you surmise I must watch. Well, horror away. I do watch that much TV. And I like it.)

So this means that, if the world is good, there's a show on most nights of the week that I like to watch. This is especially important for week nights. The world is most in balance if I can get through my working day on a Monday, for instance, and there's an episode of The Closer awaiting me at its appointed hour. That episode redeems whatever drudgery or difficulty or simply the long hours of the day that preceded it. On Tuesday, The Good Wife; on Wednesday, Modern Family; and on Thursday, the glory that is the NBC lineup, but especially Parks & Recreation. And 30 Rock.

Well, I have just named the television shows that are my mainstays at the moment. Like every other thinking person, I am awaiting the new season of Mad Men. I have several little DVD things lined up, because I either didn't have HBO, or I wasn't able to finish the series in real time (The Wire/In Treatment and Saving Grace, respectively). And I am about to go into mourning because The Closer is winding up its current stint, which will lead us inexorably into its very last episodes ever.

This summer, I started to watch Criminal Minds with my daughter, who is a huge fan of the show. I myself love a police procedural, and I came to appreciate the show. I am looking forward to the new season, which I will have to DVR so I can watch it later, as it is up against Modern Family, and the historian and I watch that one together. The DVR is hooked up to the downstairs TV. Currently, running son is residing in the downstairs lair, so it's possible that there may be a whole slew of Criminal Minds for me to watch sometime, when I don't feel I will be intruding on the whole lair-ness happening down there. Who can say.

I would like to have a bunch of new awesome shows to watch. I wish I had started Breaking Bad when it started. Ditto Men of a Certain Age and other stuff, like House. I guess. I guess I should have watched Downton Abbey, so maybe I'll try to catch up on the first season before new episodes start.

But I need to get this whole project organized. The television routine is part of what keeps everything else in its proper place, and I need that, the people. I need it, or everything else, and I, will feel crazy. Or maybe I might have to, what? do something else, like something productive. Write, or read.

But I don't want to get ahead of myself. I will be checking out a few things in the new season. And if you have something you think I should watch, something that's still broadcasting in the real world, in real time--on television, and not on my DVR--please let me know. I will consider it an act of generosity, and a kindness, which I shall never forget.

(thanks to Amelia, who pointed out this post on every day I write the book)

Researching is a recursive activity.

I find myself increasingly fascinated by the history of Dublin and Ireland, now that we've already gone and now that we're back. Before we left, of course, I was too busy getting my manuscript ready to learn about the place we were going. But onward, as there is plenty of time for self-recrimination later: for instance, we found out that Dublin was founded at the confluence of the Liffey and the River Poddle. The Poddle made settlement at the Dublin location possible--the Liffey is a freshwater river at its source, but in Dublin, it's tidal and therefore salty. The Poddle was a freshwater river; the confluence created a pool which gave Dublin its name (Dubh Linn = black pool).

But these days, the Poddle has gone, for the most part, underground. How does a river go underground? I asked myself, whilst in Dublin. Well, it turns out that this can happen a number of ways, including naturally, but it's also true that rivers can be diverted and culverted and even built over, which is what happened to the Poddle. (Also, the historian told me that he read an article by a guy who is interested in all the waterways in the Salt Lake Valley that have disappeared, gone underground, etc., and London has many streams and rivers, tributaries of the Thames, that have had a similar fate.)

Anyhow, there's a guy who's not only curious but kind of obsessed about this question regarding the Poddle. I am working on getting ready to think about writing a poem about a river going underground, maybe, but in the meanwhile, I'm looking at stuff like this:



(It's a little long, but that's the way it is with obsessions.)

The interesting bits.

I'm reading a novel, Moon Tiger, by Penelope Lively, a writer I've been only dimly aware of. I picked it up because Maureen Corrigan talked about Lively briefly on one of those end-of-the-year discussions of the best books of the year, on Fresh Air. This isn't the book Corrigan mentioned--this one won the Booker Prize in the late 80s. Anyway, I'm not crazy about the book so far--the main character, the narrator, seems to be smug and rich, condescending, and (worst of all!) a self-confessed terrible mother! (Yes, my feminist readers, this speaks volumes about me, I realize.)

However: I'm forging on because of these two passages which really spoke my language:

"We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that we speak volumes -- our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorized Version surface in supermakets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive."

and this:

"Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood -- we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time capsule."