"Ugh, I can't believe you are having me read Emily Dickinson. . ."
- Frat Boy student who admitted that he had never actually read any.

What was it I wrote in the fall when break fell on the 13th week of the semester? "Like a superstitious skyscraper we skip thirteen." I like that, and we have done it again. I did not have much of a spring break to speak of, as I worked for most of it, but I did take last Thursday and Friday off, going shopping for an entertainment center with ( Read more... )

I've been wanting to post about something not grad school-related. You know, something to break up the monotony of these reports, not that I don't like to write them, as I feel they really help to crystallize this experience (which is passing all too fast) for me, but at the same time, there are other things I think and do that I want to write ( Read more... )

Sometimes right after class is done for the night or for the week, I feel a sudden depression that takes me by surprise. It is a kind of emptiness where I don't know what to do with myself. . . It is a tiny taste of that feeling I get after each semester is done, that unfocused anxiety of "shouldn't I be doing something?" And of course I should ( Read more... )

Baseball season has begun. Oh glorious baseball! You give me something to talk about with dudes I would probably have nothing else to talk to about, around work, the guy at the deli, a stranger on the subway… You give women I meet something to pretend to care about when they like me. You are the warm voice in the background of my summer evenings, ( Read more... )

Short week distorted by the fact that I took Friday off from work to lay around all day with a heating pad on my back trying to soothe away the knot that seems to go away as the day progresses only to return overnight to some new spot that only has its inaccessibility to a single man living alone in common with the last spot, just barely avoiding a ( Read more... )

My last post about graffiti was originally going to be this week's grad school report, but somehow it meandered instead and became its own thing, shrugging off the banal details of the week of classes to reveal my (no-so-)secret appreciation of vandalism.

( Here are those banal details )

A long for long sleep. A lazy morning. I crave the coming Saturday with no other desire than to wake up whenever it is I happen to wake up. I am tired. I have rediscovered the dryness of my eyes, the cracking I had forgotten but now remember all too well. . . Cracking behind them when they move, as if some nerve is fused within my skull, and its ( Read more... )

[Written at] 5:22 pm: I should probably be doing some reading for class. If not finishing A Monk's Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent, then at least reading back through parts of Absalom, Absalom! Or even starting The Fortress of Solitude to get some of it under my belt, as I do plan to read it a third time for this class, but instead I ( Read more... )

Time is doing that contraction and expansion again thing this week. It moves slowly, has a burst of sudden speed, only to slow again. Like the Whip at Coney Island, as I have said before. . . I loved that ride as a kid, mostly because I was too cowardly to ever do the "scarier" rides like roller-coasters, or ones that spun around a lot like the ( Read more... )