Useful facts.

aka, by-products of my revision process:

Did you all know about this "parasitic -n-" phenomenon? Me neither.

Carry on.

Netflix is stalking me.

OR, possibly, I am stalking Netflix. What with the instantaneous episodes of Lost. I wish I could say that I hadn't whiled away hours for two days straight watching and watching. I wish I could say it, but I cannot, for I in fact have whiled away those hours, and I will never get them back.

Question: why do The Others have that sick fixation on other people's children? Can they not have children of their own? Are there no fertility clinics on the island? This feature of the show is totally creeping me out.

In other news: tomorrow I will be doing something productive during the daylight hours. And possibly watching an episode here or there. I said AN episode, the people. Just one. Or maybe two.

In other other news: SATC the Rematch was HORRRIBLE (yes, it needed an extra "R," it was precisely that bad). Exhibit A: Liza Minnelli, at the wedding of two gay men, doing "Single Ladies." Also, many more exhibits too banal and also lame to name.

Addendum to the other other news: If I don't plant some flowers soon, I will not be able to live with myself.

Premiere.

Mind like a river: nine theses on flow.

Mind like a river from lisab on Vimeo.

Signifying dog.

Tonight, for a variety of reasons, we couldn't take Bruiser for his evening constitutional. One of those reasons was not the fact that I am watching Lost like it's my job. I'm still in the first season, and I am currently experiencing thoughts that most of America had six years ago, such as, "Matthew Fox . . . dreamy."

HOWEVER. I had just finished with one episode and was about to start the next one, when the historian spoke from the other room. I paused, said, "What?" and he said, "I thought you were done with that episode," and I said, "I was, but I was starting a new one--but do you need to talk?" and at that word--the word that rhymes with "w-a-l-k" (I spelled it, although the B can also spell)--my intelligent canine roused himself from his torpor, and said, effectively, "I know that word: rhymes with walk."

Other signs and portents the B can interpret:

• the putting on of sneakers
• when I say, "so shall we do this?"
• or when I say, "so, what do you think?"
• or when I say, "Okay!"

All these things mean "walk." Walk WALK walk walk walk. The only word that's as important as walk in the Bruiser lexicon is "food," but he prefers that, rather than using the alphabet, we spell this word with actual cheese.

And now, resuming my Lost viewing.

Flow.

I'm working on a project that I last touched last October, a little video essay about flow. This means, of course, that I have been listening to little clips of Hank Williams all day, with a smidgen of cover action (same song) by Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash, and Slim Whitman. It's a beautiful song.

As I was walking Bruiser this morning, with an overcast sky threatening rain, I kept thinking about this--the process or whatever it is--act of God? blessing? mercy? dumb luck--of falling into something and not being hoisted out of it by nerves or distraction or duty or whatever. Just going with it. The "it" could be anything: cooking, reading, writing, walking . . .

It's not too long before we go up to Idaho for an extended visit. I tend to think of this place as conducive to flow. I think it's because there's a river. River river river I can't wait to see you.

Thoughts on order.

Since my grades got finished (by the grace of God, a pinch of pixie dust, a sturdy set of rubrics, a malleable set of metrics, and a fair amount of cursing), I have accomplished the following:

• picked up books on hold at the public library
• paid slightly sad amount of library overdue fines so I could check out the above
• found loads of books I purchased from Amazon etc. during bouts of stress-induced online buying
• straightened up my study.

I don't really wish to discuss my method for straightening, since it's more like "moving things off my desk into other locations, such as boxes," but the surface of the desk is tidier, more expansive, slightly more without stuff, more conducive to creative work, which is what I'm after. (Also, my soul feels a little freer, even if I know I'm kind of lying to myself about the true extent of the tidiness--this is my particular bargain with chaos, and I guess I'm sticking to it.)

ANYHOW. I was reading an article in the Innovations edition of The New Yorker, an article about this engineer, Saul Griffith, and his work with renewable energy. Here's the writer's description of Griffith's lab:

Griffith seems to operate on the principle that excessive orderliness is inefficient, and that neatly putting things away is more time-consuming, in the long run, than searching through piles.

If only I had won a $30,000 prize for my innovative invention at M.I.T. when I was a student there (I went where I went, okay?), and then won a MacArthur Genius grant--I could totally be this guy.

One sentence.

"The grading is finished," she announced,

"except for this one guy who, well,

where on earth is his community writing project,

and this other guy

who did not revise one thing in his final portfolio,

so I have to stew some more

about that,

but aside from those guys,

I say it's now officially summer,"

and with that

she wrapped the quilt more

closely around her because apparently

May is, like, late winter in

these

dark times.

tags: sententia

School or not school? you be the judge.

1. I have ten school-related meetings this week.

2. TEN.

3. Still grading.

4. I'm engaging in long obsessive worryings about this-and-that. School-related, natch.

5. I bought two heliotropes, a fantastic pelargonium, and three marguerite daisies (pink) today.

6. We moved the outside pots outside, where they belong. In the rain.

7. I'm still writing notes to students about things they may have forgotten.

8. I'm receiving application materials from students for the Folio editorships.

9. I am about to read great swaths of my French detective novel.

10. I wore a white dress with a grey polka-dotted sweater.

Spring pest alerts.

1. There are voles in our vicinity. Many of you are probably well aware of the Ways of the Vole, but here are some facts I did not know until recently, when the historian (a) announced that we had voles, and (b) did some research ("Google") on the vole:

• the vole is very mouselike. In fact, it's hard for the uninitiated (aka Those Ignorant of the Classes of Rodents) to tell the diff.
• Utah is rife with voles. RIFE.
• They tunnel.
• They eat plant matter, to wit: grass, your darling perennials, tulip bulbs.
• They also will nibble upon the occasional snake (!) and various insects, and also snails.Then it's right back to your Tulip Bulb Buffet.
• What to do with the vole? Your humane traps are useless. There are 900 million voles in your backyard and they are reproducing like, well, voles, with their natural predators being the hawk and the coyote, neither of which we happen to have in residence for Predation Duty.
• Poison is right out. It will not be done in this backyard, neither in the here nor the hereafter, that is how strongly I feel about this.

In sum: Voles! F***ing voles!

2. There was one brief snake sighting today, in the grass (i.e., on the lawnlike roof of Voleville). It slithered away on its own recognizance. Perhaps it overheard us talking about the voles.

3. While I was out and about purchasing a lovely little gift for my mother today, I ran into the snail bait section of my local garden shop. Let me just say, the snail bait people are not subtle. There was one variety of snail bait called, and I did not make this up, "Snail Death." Poor snails. Do they have a choice about having that thin candy shell not fully enclosing their gastropodic bodies? or about the slime? or about the fact that they are disgusting. They do not. Yet the snails I cannot abide.

Perhaps the voles will be on the snail beat, and I will not have to pick them gingerly off my geraniums and lemon verbena (I'm sounding like a crotchety old lady, I'm fully aware of this) and toss them with great accuracy onto the parking strip, where they are (a) far away from my crotchety old lady plants, and (b) not in the street, where Snail Death of the non-bait variety surely lies.

tags: pest, rodent, reptile, gastropods, facts

Open letter to the Academic Year 2009-2010.

Dear Academic Year 2009-2010,

Although I have not yet submitted a single grade, you are almost over. If not all the way over, then virtually over. "Over." As in, I am over you. Mostly. Except for that one student I'm talking to on Saturday morning. And the few extensions I granted, but really: OVER, just about.

I have totaled up the participation portion of your grade. I have read your portfolio, Academic Year 2009-2010, and I have assessed its rhetoricity. I have contemplated, though only by means of the sidelong glance, your collateral damage, and guess what? I am denying you your incomplete.

I have a gown but no cap and certainly no regalia, Academic Year 2009-2010. I am not down with regalia. I am, to be honest, not down with the gown, either, but I'm called upon to wear it. That's one of my problems with you, Academic Year 2009-10: you have been just about twenty-five percent too much of that kind of dress-up and show-up nonsense.

Academic Year 2009-2010, I feel I have satisfied your demands (except for the grades). I have the data and the documents. So this is me, blowing you a kiss goodbye. I am brushing the dust of you off my sandals, so to speak.

Academic Year 2009-2010, it's been swell. So long.

sincerely,

htms

My agenda.

1. Grade.

2. Lunch with birthday boy grandson.

3. Consult with 3 students.

4. Grade.

5. Scavenge dinner.

6. Grade.

7. The Office.

8. 30 Rock.

9. Walk the dog.

10. Grade.

TAGS: tedious

Quite a bit better, thanks for asking.

Readers of this blog will be glad to know that a certain Curtain of Melancholy has lifted around here.

What? You've never heard of "The Curtain of Melancholy"? Well, it goes a little something like this:

• too many projects come to their
• various critical points all at the same moment,
• I think I'm going to collapse or have a stroke or something,
• the critical points happen and everything goes fine, brief moment of elation followed by
• a crash/deep hole of despair. Out of which I
• clamber back into Life. Possibly.

Need a PowerPoint for that? Got it:

Curtain of melancholy

View more presentations from hightouchmegastore.

Anyway. Friday, I took the Folio editors to lunch. We had a wonderful time and I was reminded that their connections with each other are one of the ancillary--maybe even one of the main--excellent outcomes of this project. Then we saw Date Night, which was pretty darned entertaining (aka, just what the Date Night Doctor ordered--see how meta that is?). Then, a Saturday in which I took my grandson with me to the grocery store and made him lunch while his folks were moving house; cleaned out my closets and began transitioning to the warm weather clothes (if this sounds to you like too large of an event for clothes, you may be right--but that's how it works around here. Maybe. If it actually does help me to manage my sartorial apparatus); went to a work event honoring a colleague, which was fun and inspiring.

Curtain: lifted. Grading: commences tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.

Pause.

before grading

before May

before the next round of the playoffs

before school is finally, fully out

before bed

I am trying to just breathe.

Stats.

I'm in no mood.

Here's what I should do before I go to bed:

1. find that one list I wrote to myself on Friday about all the things I need to do. The one that has things that aren't just right in my face--the slightly further reaching things. The ones that I'll wake up remembering, in the middle of the night.

2. do the dishes.

3. have a reckoning with myself about my life.

4. finish the never-ending responding. The responding!

5. pat my pockets for all the things I'm forgetting.

6. start my fitness plan.

7. write a poem.

8. strip the wallpaper in my bedroom.

9. read Proust, leftover Proust, from that one time I read about 50 pages for my book group. Also, and on this same topic, The Tale of Genji.

10. cry a little.

11. draft a position paper on a compensation issue for the faculty at my college.

12. try not to forget any of the times I said I would talk to, chat with, or meet with a student in the next couple of days.

13. I'm pretty sure there's something else I'm forgetting.

What I am going to do instead is read my French detective novel and maybe do a crossword puzzle. And probably cry a little.

Best apps ever.

I was reading ProfHacker column in the Chronicle of Higher Ed today. It's kind of a cool column, some tech savvy professors trying to give help to the benighted, with tech stuff that applies to teaching, scholarship, and other educational productivity blah blzzzzzzzzz what? Right: productivity.

One of the ProfHacker posters recommended tools, some tech-related (Evernote), some not (a fancy kind of notebook I can't remember and now I can't find the post again--FRUSTRATING), some of which I explored for a minute or an hour or two while I was also "grading." Which leads me now to consider my favorite apps, in the spirit of sharing and helping, because I am all about that. Forthwith:

Apps of Glory.

App 1. Fountain pen. Yes, the fountain pen represents nothing so much as the possibility that ink could explode (or 'splode, as I like to say, in homage to the way I think Ricky Ricardo might say it in a beloved yet elusive episode of I Love Lucy) all over your bad self. But on a good day, here are two things the fountain pen will do for you: (a) dignify every motherloving word you write with ink flowing elegantly from a nib (Yes! Nib!), and (b) provoke the envy of your peers. I recommend a child's fountain pen, such as the Pelikan Pelicano Junior. It is fat, it is comfortable to hold, it is sassy.

"But is it an app?" you say.

"Why, yes," I reply. "It allows for the application of ink to paper. Also the application of attitude to any situation. What definition of 'app' are you using?"

App 2. Notebook. Someone on that ProfHacker post (gone to time, gone to the black hole of the internets, oh post of yore or this afternoon, where have you skedaddled to?) made a snide remark about the Moleskine notebook being pretentious. Yes, I know that the Moleskine is something white people love. Yes, yes, yes, go on ahead. But the Moleskine has one great thing going for it: that elastic band that keeps it shut. No, two things: the color of the paper is creamy ivory. Three things: also, the texture of the paper is extremely fine--smooth, beautiful to write on. With your fountain pen. Four things: the pocket. Trendy, pretentious, whatever. It's a damn fine notebook. I am currently filling the Reporter's Notebook with my deep, deep, complicated thoughts. I recommend that you do likewise. I like my notebooks without ruled lines, because my thoughts are deep and complicated enough that lines would constrain them. I'm sure you know exactly what I mean.

"But is it an app?" you query.

"Why yes, it is," I reply. "It is an application for storing your deep, deep, complicated thoughts on creamy ivory paper of an illustrious texture, and for your receipts and other doodads in the pocket, and out of which nothing will ever be lost, because: elastic band."

App 3. Genius function on iTunes. OMG I love the Genius. Today I started with the Grandaddy cover of the Beatles "Revolution,"

Revolution - Grandaddy

and before you know it I was hearing good stuff like nobody's business. Moreover, while I was hearing a song by Iron and Wine, I thought to myself, I wonder if Rufus Wainwright will show up in this playlist. And what do you know, the very next song was "Poses."

Poses - Rufus Wainwright

What I'm saying, the people, is: my Genius can read my mind.

"But is it an app?" you ask.

"Of course it's an app," I reply. "It's on my iPod."

tags: app, cool shit, stuff

Top 5 of everything.

At the moment, anyway--

1. Grilled cheese sandwich

2. Baby walks around saying "Oh my GAH"

3. Bruiser

4. Googling "cottage in France" and finding a bazillion, some of which we could afford

5. the memory of Ireland

Unsolicited feedback to persons who are unlikely ever to read this.

TO: My local public radio station

FROM: htms

date: 21 April 2010

re: pledge drive

Please, please, please just send me a bill. Go ahead, make it a fat bill. Just give me back my radio programs. I can't take it anymore.

*

TO: the person or persons who stole our garbage receptacles, two of them, and tipped them over, way up the street

FROM: htms

date: 21 April 2010

re: our garbage receptacles, two of them, tipped over, way up the street

Seriously? SERIOUSLY.

*

TO: the guy I heard on NPR, talking about that ridiculous proposed new immigration law in Arizona

FROM: htms

date: 21 April 2010

re: your use of the word "swarthy"

Thank you very much for using the word "swarthy." I have not heard that word used in, like, twenty years. I would especially like to commend you on your particular pronunciation of it, with a soft "th," which gave it especial panache.

Your point, also--that this ridiculous proposed legislation is really about racial profiling, identifying "brown people, swarthy people" as suspect illegals--is very well taken.

Sir: I admire you. Well-played.

Today is the day

I got caught up, or got started on the get-caught-up project.

Today is the day I received lavender shoes in the mail.

Today is the day I made sloppy joe (I don't think it needs a plural, do you?) for homeless guys. (join this project--it's a good one!).

Today's the day I realized yet again that I find watching the Jazz play in high stakes games almost unbearable. Never mind that a Chauncey Billups/D Will matchup is kind of awesomely watchable. If only I could stand to watch.

Today is the day I was home, quiet, working, with Bruiser--presentiment of summer.

Today, two poems, neither of them much to speak of. Today, no (visible) snakes.

Serpentless day.

All observers who were horrified by the previous snakes can, as of today, settle down. We had a day with no snake sightings. Moreover, I found out all sorts of things about the historian's snake shenanigans. Apparently, the historian, whom I believe to be one of the world's most secular men, is a snake-handler. If by "snake-handler," we mean "a man who will shoo snakes back to a safer place so they won't run into the road and get run over by a car."

The way I see it, you can find this admirable, in the way that we admire the great humanitarians, because he's looking out for the creatures of the world.

On the other hand, they're snakes. Here's a bit of the colloquy between my son who is in China and myself this morning:

Walker: has that snake been crucified yet?

me: it was a bunch of garden snakes.

I think there were like six of them.

Walker: six?

8:18 AM me: seriously

Walker: what did you do with them?

me: I have another picture of them dispersiing

Walker: it looked like one

me: they ran away

under a rock

Walker: ahhh!

me: I know it was creepy

they were all in a pile

Walker: call the exterminator

Walker: they were probably mating

me: gaaaa

Walker: i know, we need them out

before there are millions

8:19 AM me: they eat spiders

and mice

Walker: i really am freaked out, i don't ever want to see that picture again

i don't care they might eat me

me: okay, okay

but you know John

Walker: kill!kill!

me: he shooed them away because he was afraid they might go into the street and get hurt

Walker: no!

me: I kid you not.

8:20 AM Walker: what if they crawl into my room through the window well?

me: I will point this out.

Walker: at least shoo them into the horse place

that's probably where they all come from

me: it was in the front yard

john says he might try to "relocate" them and I will encourage the field to be the relocation place

Walker: those snakes will be the death of me

me: do you remember when you trapped one under a flower pot?

Walker: maybe

me: I do.

I wrote a poem about it.

Walker: did we kill it, because we should have

what did we do with it?

me: no, we released it into the wild

I wouldn't let you kill it

Walker: he is probably the root of this mess

Let me add to this bit of trans-continental discourse that the historian's snake relocation methods include putting the snake into a paper bag. Does this involve picking up the snake with his hands? Yes, yes it does. It goes without saying that the hands are bare, as in, without protective snake-proof gloves with tongs attached.

"Wow, I guess everyone's freaked out by the snakes," he says, mildly, after singing son calls to ask about the snakes.

Sir, the reason we are freaked out is that they are snakes. Do I have to spell it for you? S-N-A-K-E-S. Which word, by the way, comes from the way way back Proto-Indo-European root for "super-f***ing-uncanny limbless elongate." I looked it up.

Today's poem, perhaps uncoincidentally titled "To a snake."

tags: serpentless