Crownless

Cancelled class this morning to cope with a minor dental emergency: a crown fell out. My dentist glued it back in this morning (and let me just say how much I appreciate office hours that begin at 7:40 a.m.), but he said this is only a temporary fix, that because of problems with the interface (!) between the crown and the tooth we'll have to start looking for "a permanent solution," which sounds close enough to The Final Solution to suggest euthansia, which would be perfectly fine with me right now because even though there's nothing remotely resembling a nerve left in that tooth, my entire face hurts enough to make me want to put it out of its misery.

No waffling on whifflers

Today I learned a new (very old) word: whiffler, an attendant who clears the way for a procession, derived from a Middle English term for an armed attendant, which in turn derives from OE wifel, meaning battle-ax. Whifflers are the big brawny (sometimes armed) guys who shove the adoring crowd out of the way before the parade passes by, the crowd controllers in the entourage.

Imagine how smoothly my life would proceed if I were accompanied by a whole host of whifflers. A bevy of whifflers would make a visit to the mall much more productive, particularly in the Christmas season, and I could really use some whifflers when I'm trying to use the drive-through at the bank at 5:30 Friday afternoon. My whiffler contingent would be trained to respond to whistled commands issued by my official Whiffler Whistler, who would supervise the guy in charge of keeping the other whifflers in line--the Whiffler Wrangler. Woe to the whiffler who oversteps his authority! The Whiffler Whistler would whistle for the Whiffler Wrangler, who would wrestle the scofflaw whiffler into awareness of his authority. And then the Whiffler Whistler, the Whiffler Wrangler, and the entire entourage of whifflers would play a refreshing round of whiffle-ball and eat a stack of fluffy waffles.

There's only one problem with this plan: in today's world, where do I find a mess of whifflers? Wal-Mart?

Found poetry

Lines Encountered a Few Paragraphs into a Student Paper, Where They Work Better as Poetry than as Argument

The poet is a way
for the world to keep moving
and for the people
oppressed
on its surface
to stay faithful.

Unveiling John Henry

Alphonse Miggs sits in the Social Room of the Millhouse Inn, he sits on his hands at a table of eight, with seven folks he doesn't know. At the start of the evening his knuckles brushed against a lump in his jacket pocket. He withdrew a mothball and, supremely embarrassed, thrust it back where it came. He wasn't sure if anyone noticed his mark of shame. For the rest of the night he felt cursed with invisible pockets and all at the dinner can see his shame, the great pearl of napthalene clinging to his person, smell the fumes of social incompetence emanating from it.

Invisible pockets! Fumes of social incompetence! Apparently Alphonse Miggs has been raiding the closets of my nightmares. Miggs appears in Colson Whitehead's second novel, John Henry Days, which I am just now getting around to reading although it was published five years ago. I loved The Intuitionist and I've put Apex Hides the Hurt on my Christmas wish list, hoping that Whitehead can live up to the promise of his first book.

His second book, John Henry Days, is delightful, certainly more coherent than reviews led me to expect. Its quirky cast of journalists on a junket includes one J. Sutter, described as an "inveigler of invites and slayer of crudites, this drink ticket fondler and slim tipper, open bar opportunist, master of vouchers, queue-jumping wrangler of receipts." Sutter ventures into West Virginia for the unveiling of a new postage stamp commemorating John Henry, and there he encounters the aforementioned Alphonse Miggs, who at the moment seems to be on the verge of going postal, but I'm only 80 pages in so what do I know?

Well, I do know one thing: wherever Alphonse Miggs gets his clothes, I'm not shopping there.

On jargon

I used the word "jargon" in class yesterday and my students asked me to define it. Apparently "jargon" has become jargon.

Exit poll

The polls have closed and my own personal exit poll indicates that in the one race I really care about, my husband's ballot cancelled out mine. We could have stayed home and achieved the same effect, but at least this way we can congratulate ourselves on doing our civic duty. I wanted to do my civic duty before my 8:00 class so I wouldn't have to make a special 17-mile trip out to my polling place and back in the middle of the day, and I mistakenly assumed that the polls wouldn't be crowded at 6:45 a.m. Amazing how many people vote that early. We could have held a barn dance if it weren't so difficult to fit an accordion inside a voting booth.

One thing I'm looking forward to is a decline in the number of annoying political phone calls. This will leave us more energy to deal with the endless annoying phone calls from colleges trying to recruit the resident high school senior. He definitely gets my vote for Most Popular Resident of Our House Right Now, which is quite an achievement for a kid who's not even old enough to vote. Exit polls on the college recruiting phone calls suggest that the race is still too close to call, but a rapid influx of cash could make a big difference in the outcome.

How annoyed should I be

...when a whole mess of students miss my class because they have a big project due in another class later that day?

Moderately annoyed? Annoyed enough to put a question on the final exam that will be comprehensible only to those who attended to day's class? Or not annoyed at all?

Numerical-Gro

"Threes are being planted all over campus," wrote one of my students, and another student who was rather tickled at this image quickly created the illustration. My question is: if threes, why not fours or fives or even seventeens? Do I detect the specter of a 42 lurking just beyond the horizon?

Failure to launch

Because we're done with band competitions, because my son is interested in aviation, because the film won lots of awards, because we never saw it when it was showing in theaters, we stayed home last night and watched The Aviator on DVD. All day I've been trying to figure out why I found the film utterly awful.

For one thing, it's too long by at least half an hour; I kept hoping another airplane would crash and burn and put the entire film out of its misery. But that's not the only reason. Too many of the characters are thoroughly one-dimensional, including Alan Alda's sleazy politician and Alec Baldwin's reprise of his role from Glengarry Glen Ross. Cate Blanchett's cartoonish caricature of Katherine Hepburn was laughable, one of the few amusing spots in an otherwise humorless film. She tromped and sputtered like Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, but in that film Hepburn's energy was more than matched by Cary Grant's. Poor Cate Blanchett has only Leo DiCaprio, who is just, let's face it, small--and I'm not talking about physical stature. I kept having this feeling I was watching an elaborate dream sequence in one of the Our Gang comedies, with DiCaprio as Alfalfa.

But there's one other thing that really annoyed me about this film, and it's taken me all day to put my finger on it: It's clear that Martin Scorsese wants us to view Howard Hughes as a sort of David righteously defying the twin Goliaths of the film and airline industries, and while it's true that Hughes was a victim of his own peculiar neuroses, he was, after all, Howard Hughes. Since when does the richest man in the world get to play the role of spunky little David? Especially when the penultimate scene features one of Hughes's minions reassuring him by saying, "Howard, everyone works for you."

Despite all the lovely airplanes, The Aviator doesn't work for me. My only consolation is that I didn't have to spend $8 on a ticket.

The truth about chipmunks (well, sort of)

Some poor misguided soul, possibly a student eagerly pursuing knowledge, ended up on my blog after typing the following question into Google: "What are the behaviors and factoids of the chipmunk?" If memory serves, the only chipmunks I've mentioned on this site have been dead ones dangling from the mouth of a stray cat eager to bribe its way into our warm house. I don't know if that counts as a behavior or a factoid, but either way, it's not enough to fill a research paper. In order to rectify the dearth of information re: behaviors and factoids of the chipmunk, I offer the following:

Chipmunks are related, both etymologically and genetically, to Chia Pets. The two species have been known to reproduce, but their offspring are infertile and require frequent mowing.

Fossil evidence suggests that an early cousin of the chipmunk grew twelve feet tall and trolled for mini-marshmallows in the lakes of lime Jello that once covered most of Wisconsin. Their extinction was hastened by the introduction of Jello Lite.

Chipmunk behavior results largely from a strong instinctual drive to watch hours and hours of Chip 'n' Dale cartoons, which provide young chipmunks with models for their own antics. In chipmunk cosmology, Chip 'n' Dale are the primary deities.

Chipmunks' cheeks can stretch wide enough to allow them to swallow themselves, primarily because their factoids are larger than their deltoids.

Chipmunks may not be smart enough to be president, but they know a thing or two. For instance, you would never find a chipmunk searching for information about the behaviors and factoids of the chipmunk on an academic blog. Chipmunks know better. They use Wikipedia. In fact, you know all those editors who obsessively sort and store information on Wikipedia? Chipmunks, every one of 'em.

That's all I know about chipmunks.

Everyone's edgy

"Everyone's on edge this week," said our student office assistant, and she's right, but perhaps there are good reasons. Everyone is registering for spring classes or advising students or trying desperately to contact intransigent advisees, and those who aren't offering heartfelt stories about why they should be allowed into a class ahead of everyone else on the waitlist are listening to such stories.

Everyone is also writing or reading or grading papers or listening to excuses about why papers are not done, and everyone else is preparing or viewing or evaluating presentations. Everyone is getting ready for the two academic conferences meeting campus next week, and everyone else is making plans to get away for the weekend or hunker down in the library.

Everyone's attending committee meetings and football games and open mike nights and information sessions about the January cruise, except for those who are taking advantage of the beautiful weather to play hooky from all their responsibilities.

With everyone carrying on at such a hectic rate, it's no wonder everyone is on edge. The challenge, of course, is to avoid falling over the edge, because no one knows what's on the other side. Maybe everyone just needs to take a deep breath and relax. Let's all put our feet up and stare out the window for awhile, and if we feel ourselves drifting away from the edge, that's okay: it'll still be there when we get back.

It beggars the imagination

Yesterday I received a paper from a student who apparently has no awareness of the sexual connotations of the word "bugger," resulting in sentences referring to a certain character as "an outstanding bugger" who attends "a bugger convention." The character in question is, as you may have surmised, a surveillance expert.

Is it possible that this student has never been exposed to the vulgar use of "bugger"?

If so, how do I inform the student of this connotation without coming across as the Guardian of the Dirty Words?

Advice for the advisor?

Another season of advising is nearly over and I've concluded that I'm not a very good advisor. I'm a pro at filling out forms and fitting together courses to suit a student's needs, and I'm pretty good at guiding students through the general education maze since I know our curriculum inside out.

What I stink at is giving advice. I can give pretty good advice to students looking for the right courses to help them achieve their goals, but I never know what to say to students with no clear goals or with incompatible goals. What do I tell the kid whose mom wants him to major in engineering but whose coach doesn't want him to take any lab courses this semester? Should I tell him not to listen to his mother or not to listen to his coach?

And what do I tell the sophomore who has nearly completed his general education requirements but still has no idea what major he wants to pursue and insists on taking courses that will "count" for something? I'm tempted to suggest that he first figure out what his life is going to count for and then we'll fill in the details, but there's no little box on the degree audit sheet for that.

What do I tell the student who wants to pursue a demanding major despite failing every class she takes in that department? I can't say, "You know, there's no shame in being a welder. The world needs welders."

What do I say to the student who is clearly here to party and does not care what classes he takes as long as he doesn't have to get up before 11 a.m.? I want to remind him that someone somewhere is paying a big wad of money for his perpetual party, but I'm sure he's already heard that argument from his mom--and if he's not listening to her, why would he listen to me?

Advisors ought to advise: it's part of the job. Students, in turn, ought to study: that's why they're here. I am always happy to advise students willing to devote themselves to studying; it's the other type that makes me crazy. Where can the advisor seek advice?

Extreme grading

In the past few hours I've read both the best student paper I've seen this semester and the worst.

The terrific paper opens with a zippy sentence that ignites fireworks in my mind. The bad paper begins with a vague generalization.

The terrific paper approaches the topic in an unexpected and exciting way. The bad paper restates the same tired opinions that bored me when I first encountered them in student writing twenty years ago.

The terrific paper takes the assignment as a starting point and exceeds all expectations. The bad paper fulfills the bare minimum and then just sputters out.

The terrific paper relies on clear reasoning and information from reliable sources to make its points. The bad paper chases its own tail without ever really achieving anything except the required word count.

The terrific paper presents an original argument that advances the scholarly conversation on the topic. The bad paper was copied directly from a web site without attribution.

Despite these vast differences, these two papers have one important thing in common: they're both really easy to grade. If every paper resembled one of these extremes, I'd have that pile of papers finished in no time.

The perils of anonymity

The chief advantage of online anonymity is the ability to speak without being known. This is also the chief disadvantage.

Say you've been reading an academic blog off and on for a while and you've grown to enjoy and appreciate the blogger, inasmuch as it is possible to appreciate someone whose name you don't know. You may know a lot about the blogger, including names of pets or cars and attitudes toward both students and supervisors, but that one key piece of information is always withheld.

Then suppose one day that blog just disappears with no forwarding address.

There could be plenty of reasons for the disappearance: technical difficulties, head lice, high dudgeon, incarceration, chemotherapy, or a sudden desire for a whole-life makeover. But you'll never know, will you? Without a name, you can't even track the person down without devoting a lot of time and energy and technological know-how that you never got around to developing because of all the time you've spent building up your tenure file, and then if by some freak of nature you did manage to track the person down, what would you say? "Um, you don't know me but I've been reading your blog and I've been wondering: you know that job situation you were talking about? How did that ever turn out, anyway? None of my business, of course, but what ever happened with that head lice infestation?"

No, that blogger has become yet another story you'll never know the end of.

That's the problem with anonymity: it's too easy for individuals to fade out of the community. If this is, indeed, a community. It's tempting to think of the blogosphere as a sort of amorphous online community of compulsive communicators, but it's more like an twelve-step group in which individuals are represented by shape-shifting puppets. When a puppet disappears, what can the community do? Laugh, mourn, move on? It's impossible to know.

The solution, of course, is simple: eliminate anonymity. Name names. Reveal faces.

You first.

Deluged

I took advantage of a brief hiatus in the deluge to take a walk and survey conditions. Our babbling brook has reached full Raging Torrent stage but it's not out of its banks or over our bridge, although I imagine that some of our neighbors with lower bridges are pretty much stuck at home today. I saw three deer crossing the creek at a relatively low spot and even they were struggling to keep their heads above water. The bluff across the road from our meadow is awash in rollicking little waterfalls that will last as long as the wet weather does, and the path up to the upper meadow looks like one oozing mass of mud. All in all, it looks like we'll have a lovely weekend--Lord willing and the creek don't rise.

Indecision in the dairy section

All I wanted to do was make some kohlrabi soup--a simple desire born of the abundance of kohlrabi in our garden combined with the kind of cold, wet, nasty weather that drives one soupward. I didn't expect to be faced with a crisis of indecision in the dairy section.

The problem is that the recipe calls for heavy cream. While heavy cream imparts a lovely texture that makes the tangy taste of kohlrabi cuddle right up to one's tongue, it also tends over time to put the squeeze on one's heart health. I could just subtitute milk for the cream, but I don't like to give up the texture entirely, so I usually buy half-and-half.

Yesterday, for the first time, I was faced with the following options: traditional, low-fat, or fat-free half-and-half. Now I'm really confused. The problem, I think, stems from the fact that I'm not entirely sure what half-and-half is. It's creamier than milk but wimpier than whipping cream, and I've always assumed that the difference is in the fat content.

Now I have to wonder: how is fat-free half-and-half different from skim milk? Would low-fat half-and-half impart the requisite creamy texture to the soup? Do I have to try each one of these varieties to find out? I've got a lot of kohlrabi, but even I don't want to eat kohlrabi soup every day. And if half-and-half can be fat-free, why can't we buy fat-free whipping cream?

That's just too much to think about on a Friday afternoon, so in the end I wimped out and opted for traditional half-and-half. The results were excellent: creamy but not overly rich, tangy but not bitter--an ideal soup for a cold rainy day. That warm, soothing soup blanketed my mind and removed all desire to interrogate dairy products. Fat content? Who cares! Just pour me some more of that kohlrabi soup.

Morning exercise

I had a little fantasy this morning while doing my pre-dawn exercises involving an ice scraper and three cars with ice-covered windows. I reach and scrape and do a little hop and reach and scrape and wish I had a garage, except I do have a garage--an incipient garage or, considering the construction materials piled all over the floor, perhaps a garage kit. The saga of our emerging garage goes back to early 2005, and it's too painful to tell in any detail. It was supposed to be usable in August of 2005 and then in November. A year later, it still isn't. If we had all the money we've poured into this project, we could sew it together into a nice blanket to keep the ice off our cars.

But there are signs of hope: our new contractor has been squeezing in some work on our garage while trying to finish another larger project; last week the power company hooked up the electricity, and yesterday someone tied bright orange construction tape to the sign at the end of our driveway to signal that this is the place where stuff is happening. Bring it on! I need a garage.

Meanwhile, I'll reach and scrape and reach and scrape and indulge in elaborate fantasies about my emerging garage.

Time out

I've just succeeded in making a recalcitrant computer program do its job by following the complex and sophisticated instructions of our IT department: "Didja try rebooting?" Power down, power up, bingo: it works. It's not quite as satisfying as kicking the Coke machine, but it's definitely more effective.

I'm trying to think of a human equivalent for this technique: "Common cold? Let's just stop that heart for a few minutes and start it up again and see if that solves the problem."

With all the technological know-how at our disposal, it's astounding that the most frequent remedy for computer problems is something as simple as giving the computer a little nap. If it works with toddlers, why not with computers?

Next time my computer acts up, I'll send it to the time-out box.

Nothing to say

I'm not sure what to write about today but I know a few things I'm not going to write about. I definitely won't mention the resume that listed, under Work Experience, "assassinating new mangers," and I don't intend to say a word about the Washington Post article proclaiming that grammar is back in fashion (but you can read about it here). I don't intend to talk about the aspect of student advising I enjoy (putting data into little boxes on forms) and the part I really dislike (dealing with students who don't have any kind of plan, vision, or purpose for their lives and who are happy to remain blissfully ignorant of the requirements for their programs).

I'm not going to talk about the weather (cold but crisp, a perfect fall day) or the fact that when I reluctantly left the house at 7:00 this morning I had to walk away from a lovely fire blazing in the fireplace, the first fire the resident firebrand has started this season. I won't puzzle over possible reasons for the excellent quality of my freshman students' most recent papers, and I won't mention how much I enjoyed reading them or how proud I am of their progress.

I certainly don't intend to write about how disappointed I've been in Sia Figiel's fiction, which seems unpolished and derivative, and I don't even want to think about whether I should force myself to read a book just because I spent good money on it. I'd rather not revisit the angst I experienced yesterday when the server was down and I couldn't check my e-mail for more than three hours, and I really don't want to write about the disturbing new noise emanating from the underside of my car.

Now that that's settled, it looks like I really don't have anything to write about today. Guess I'll just put it off until tomorrow.

The journey that never ends

When asked what readers should think about the ending of Voyage along the Horizon, Javier Marias responded thus:

That the end of the novel isn't usually very important. In fact, people never seem to remember the endings of novels (most especially crime novels--that's what makes them so re-readable) and movies (especially, once again, thrillers and whodunits). Conclusions and final explanations are often the most irrelevant--and disappointing--parts of a novel. What counts the most--and what we remember the most--is the atmosphere, the style, the path, the journey, and the world in which we have immersed ourselves for a few hours or a few days while reading a novel or watching a movie. What matters, then, is the journey along the horizon--in other words, the journey that never ends.

How many roads?

Last week Jan Freeman tracked down the origin of a particularly egregious bowdlerization of a Bob Dylan song; you can read about it here.

Now, everybody, sing it with me! "How many roads must an individual walk down before you can call them an adult...."

Nominally, spelling

I've been trying to grade a pile of papers this afternoon but I keep getting distracted by an annoyingly insistent internal debate regarding spelling. The writing assignment calls for a straightforward summary of the ideas of a particular literary theorist, and the papers I've looked at are competent if not brilliant; however, in three out of four papers, the author's name is spelled wrong. We're not talking about Baudrillard either; the names under discussion are no more difficult than Smith or Jones. It annoys me to see the same author's name spelled three different ways in the same paper, but how do I translate this annoyance into a grade?

If a name is a word like any other word, then spelling the author's name wrong should be no more serious than spelling any other word wrong. But somehow it is more serious--of this I am certain. How can anyone write an entire paper about a particular author and never bother to notice how that author spells her name? That kind of carelessness makes me wonder how accurately the paper conveys the author's words and ideas--and sure enough, further checking reveals a whole host of inaccurately transcribed quotations and sloppy paraphrases, all brought to light by a bit of carelessness with names.

Before I make big red marks all over the page, though, I am reminded of a book by a noted ecocritical scholar (and published by a university press) in which he spelled the same author's name three different ways on the same page. That combination of carelessness and bad copyediting made me question the reliability of the entire book, a response that strikes even me as excessive.

After all, it's just a name. Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me, regardless of how they're spelled. As long as the ideas are explained clearly, who cares how the names are spelled?

The answer, I'm afraid, is I do. I care deeply. I realize this makes me a bit of a pedant, but I frimly bleieve that anyone wishing to be taken seriously in a conversation, literary or otherwise, ought to accord others the basic respect of calling them by their names--their own names, and not some clumsy approximation.

Now that that's settled, my next challenge also involves putting letters in the right place: what leters will I place on that big pile of papers?

Living for the weekend

Friday! And after a week of rain, our babbling brook has become a raging torrent. The road isn't under water (yet), but the river is rising and more rain is on the way. Could be an exciting weekend.

This morning's class involved a heated discussion of Amiri Baraka's play "Dutchman," heated not because of the topic but because of the temperature. We have a campus crawling with smart people but we can't manage to keep our environment comfortable: a week ago it was freezing in here and now I sweat through every class. Some brilliant person turned the thermostat up to 80 degrees in one of the rooms, which inspired someone to open the window, which made the heating system work even harder, which goes a long way toward explaining why the bills are so high. The room I was in this morning doesn't have windows, so we were stuck with the heat--unless we wanted to meet outside, which is difficult when the rain won't go away.

But despite all the griping and groaning, there's one important fact to remember: it's Friday, and neither rain nor heat nor dark of night can keep the weekend from making its appointed rounds.

Mark my words

I come before you today to address a serious problem that threatens the moral fiber of this institution and indeed of this great nation. I speak, of course, of smelly dry-erase markers.

I stand before a class full of students engaged in the pursuit of knowledge when suddenly the intoxicating scent of dry-erase markers wafts over me, making me woozy, loopy, and disconnected from reality, which results in a struggle to maintain dignity and order. Then the scent drifts among the students and in no time at all they're begging for more: "Bring it over here! Let me sniff it! Dr. X always lets me sniff his markers!" Before you know it, the class has devolved into chaos, with scent-addled students fighting for another sniff from the marker. Over time, this results in our loosing upon the unsuspecting public a generation of loopy students intent upon pursuing their next hit of marker and willing to run over anyone who stands in their way.

Now is the time to prevent this tragedy. Nip it in the bud, I say! It's time to demand that Congress enact comprehensive marker-control legislation, because when smelly markers are outlawed, only outlaws will have smelly markers. I could list the benefits of such legislation on the dry-erase board right here, starting with....um, was I saying something?

Busted

I generally don't make a habit of noticing my visitors' undergarments (or lack thereof); after all, out of sight is out of mind, and I'd have to be out of my mind to pay attention to what my visitors choose to keep out of sight. However, when a woman old enough to know better comes sashaying into my office with her assets swinging in the breeze, it's difficult not to notice--and wish I hadn't.

Some people just shouldn't go braless, and I would include in that category most well-endowed women over the age of 60. The last time the Braless Wonder came into my office, many people noticed her lack of appropriate undergarments, so this time they were on the lookout. "Didja see?" they asked. Yes, I saw; I had no choice but to see. I tried to maintain eye contact and avoid any knowledge of anything below the neck, but then she sat down and let it all hang out right at my eye level. It's difficult to keep an intelligent conversation going in the presence of such pendulous, prominent, unprotected bosoms.

After she left, some of us were talking about taking up a collection to buy her some bras, but there's no tactful way to broach the delicate topic of cup size with a woman far past the bra-burning age. When I am old I shall wear purple--but I'll be sure to accompany it with appropriate undergarments.

Better living through punctuation

I drove to work in the dark this morning, the wet black pavement reinforcing the feeling that I was driving straight down into the maw of a ravenous beast, and then I found my 8:00 composition students sitting in the dark classroom with the lights off and their heads on the desks. A bleak beginning--and a perfect time to delve into ideas about how to make the world a better place.

"An ideal world would be full of friendly soccer players that own exotic pets," wrote one group of students, while another insisted on less formal education and more gadgets. My students want to live in luxurious houses with plenty of technology and people to serve their needs, but they also want an end to poverty and class distinctions. They want world peace, but they also insist on voice-activated televisions. One would outlaw early-morning English classes and all fine arts classes, while another student calls for more music in the world. Some want no rules at all, while others want more rules and better enforcement.

In my ideal world, everyone would write elegant, effective sentences all the time--which is why we spent the rest of the class period puzzling over punctuation. By the end of class, the rain had stopped and the sun was out and the world looked like a better place, or if not better, at least significantly brighter.

Better than Tetris

A gentle buzz fills the room as my students discuss some literary theory in groups, and a bigger buzz fills my brain as I stand before the class blogging while they work. I get a particular thrill out of blogging during class, the same kind of thrill I used to get as a journalist when I would sit at the back of a meeting of the Board of Public Affairs frantically tip-tapping on the keys of a laptop computer while three old farts sat up front discussing, say, water and sewer rates. They would occasionally look my way as if eager to have their words preserved for eternity, and I would nod and smile mysteriously and keep tapping away at a game of Tetris.

Blogging is better than Tetris, and blogging in class is better than anything that ever happened during a Board of Public Affairs meeting, including the meeting in which the chair of the BPA called the water and sewer superintendent "Baldy" on the public record. But even this would lose its thrill if I did it all the time--and besides, my students need me. So I'll just hit "publish" and get back to work.

Remedy for relevance

The latest PMLA arrived chock-full of articles about the relationship between the Humanities and Human Rights, an important and interesting topic to be sure but it made me wonder whether the discipline is entering into another bout of Relevance Envy, when scholars who have spent their lives developing expertise in, for instance, 17th-century poetry feel the sudden urge to prove that the topic plays an essential role in our understanding of current political and social issues. Relevance Envy is a cousin to Sliderule Envy, which compels literary scholars to quantify uncontrollably while attempting to introduce scientific rigor into the study of literature. Both maladies are characterized by feverish bursts of scholarly activity pursued with evangelical fervor, followed by a quick fall into torpor acompanied by feelings of regret and futility. There's only one remedy--bed rest and a good book--and while the bed rest may be superfluous, there's no better way to convince one of one's utter irrelevance than to curl up with a good book.

Don't tread on me

If an ad in the Oct. 16 issue of the New Yorker can be believed, then today's well-dressed woman is wearing on her head a shoe. At least I think that's a shoe; it bears a striking resemblance to either a medieval torture device or a complicated piece of plumbing paraphernalia, but it bears the Louis Vuitton label so whatever it is, I can't afford it. Which is just as well because I'd hate to end up looking like the woman in the ad, whose expression suggests that she's only vaguely aware that something strikingly inappropriate has landed on her head.

I realize that it's a mistake to seek sartorial advice from slick magazine ads touting products that aren't even available out here in the sticks. If I looked to New Yorker ads for fashion advice, I might show up for work one day wearing little more than sequins, feathers, and an elephant, and that would be traumatic for all involved, not least the elephant. If I wore that Louis Vuitton shoe on my head, my colleagues would not exclaim over my fashion sense or rush out to buy Louis Vuitton shoes to balance on their own noggins. No: they would back slowly away saying soothingly, "There there now, everything's going to be just fine," and then they'd bolt for the phones to call for reinforcements.

So thanks just the same, Louis Vuitton, but if shoes on the head are the latest fashion trend, I think I'll sit this one out. It isn't the first time and it won't be the last that I'll sit on the sidelines watching the fashion parade and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Birds of a feather

A pair of plump woodpeckers paid a visit recently. They tend to stick around all winter long.

Important Imput

I just received a message thanking me for my "imput" on a particular topic and I was ready to guffaw loudly, but then I wondered: what term would you use to describe information received via Instant Messaging? IMput sounds about right; it's still not right in this case, though, because whatever input I put into this project was not communicated via IM. However, the popularity of Instant Messaging suggests a brave new world of innovative vocabulary. How do you describe former Rep. Foley's instant messages to congressional pages? IMmature. How do Instant Messagers regard conventional spelling and grammar rules? IMmaterial. What happens to a student whose addiction to Instant Messaging causes him to crash and burn in his classes? Self-IMmolation.

I could go on all day--but I'd rather hear from others. Come on: send me your imput.

A one-sided conversation

There's nothing worse than showing up ready for a rousing discussion of wonderful literature and finding the class unprepared. I had re-read Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon over the weekend and I walked into class eager to dive head-first into my second-favorite Morrison novel, but I had forgotten one thing: my students just got back from fall break. Nobody reads literature over fall break. Not even when the assigned reading is by Toni Morrison.

I did my little song-and-dance about Lorain and Morrison's other novels and kinship and rituals and community, but when we got done dancing around the novel and had to actually step into it, the room went silent. Faces became blank and eyes avoided my gaze. It was clear that no one--no one!--had done the required reading.

I wanted to ask what they had read over break but I was afraid the answer would be "nothing." how can anyone go four days without reading? How can anyone spend four days in the presence of an unread Toni Morrison novel and not open it up? I felt like a chef offering an exquisite feast to starving people only to have them say, "No thanks; I'm on a diet," or like a suitor presenting a diamond ring to the love of his life only to hear her say, "Hold on, would you? I've got to take this call."

I suppose I can try again Wednesday. I think I'll let them do the teaching this time. Maybe we'll all learn something new.

Excess baggage

I'm back home again and ready to face the world--although I'm not sure I'm ready to face the 98 e-mail messages waiting in my inbox. I did check e-mail a few times while I was away, but I stopped after a cockroach crawled out from under the keyboard at coffeeshop. I've heard of bugs in the system, but that's just too much.

Would it hurt anything if I just deleted all 98 messages? I am, after all, still on fall break, and I prefer not to carry that kind of baggage on a vacation day. On the other hand, if I ignore them today, they'll still be waiting for me tomorrow along with 98 more. What I need is someone to weed through the messages and tell me which ones are important and which ones can be deleted unread. Where's my entourage when I need them?

Must have left 'em in Kentucky.

Absent-minded prof

Yesterday I encountered two faculty members who had a big influence on my life 20-some years ago and neither one of them remembered me. I shouldn't be surprised: I don't visit or maintain contact for more than 20 years and then I pop up out of the blue and say "Remember me?" They've been working on remembering the hordes of new students they encounter in classes every semester while I've become a dim memory.

The amazing thing, though, is that professors can have a tremendous impact on their students' minds without the students making much impact on the professors' minds. If one of my current composition students shows up 20 years from now and says, "Remember me? You changed my life!" I'm sure I'll be flattered, but that doesn't mean I'll be able to remember her name. Students who take one class with me and then fade into the crowd tend to blur together in my mind; the ones I remember most are those who make some kind of trouble and those I see in several classes, primarily English majors.

Even the more memorable students graduate eventually (or if they don't graduate, at least they go away), and new crowds of students demand my attention. In the long term, how many can I possibly remember? Not many. Which is why I can expect someday to replay the scene I experienced yesterday, only in reverse: this time I'll be the befuddled prof trying to remember the name of the student whose has never forgotten the influence I had on his or her life. "Thank you," I'll say, 'Whoever you are."

On speed

It was a perfect day for driving: clear blue sky, crisp air, lovely red and yellow fall leaves everywhere. In five hours on the road today I passed Measely Ridge Road, Gravel Wash Road, Tranquility Pike, and Basil Rutter Field, Home of the Bulldogs. I saw plenty of deer carcasses but also a more unusual type of roadkill: teddy bears, at least a dozen of 'em, strewn along the side of I-75. The turkey vultures were more interested in the deer.

It's been a while since I drove on I-75 and I had forgotten that the average interstate driver considers the speed limit merely a suggestion. I was going 70 most of the time and I was being passed by little old ladies in Packards, toddlers on Big Wheels, and sloths on crutches. After all that speed it was good to come to a complete stop.

I'll be visiting my daughter at college for the next few days. I'm writing this from her room in the same dorm where I lived 23 years ago, except it's much nicer now, brighter and prettier and air conditioned, not to mention wired. There's a flurry of activity around me but I'm happy to just be still for a while, to enjoy a three-day detour from the high-speed highway of life. Tuesday morning I'll be on the road again but until then my speed limit will hover as close to 0 as I can get it.

Laptop lapses

My 8:00 class looks a bit disjointed this morning: roughly half the students face forward while the other half have turned their desks to face the back wall. It looks like half the class is being punished, but no: they're just taking their midterm, an in-class essay, and those who choose to use a laptop are facing the back wall so I can see all the screens. I've told them that they can use any resource available inside the classroom, but if I see any signs of e-mailing, instant messaging, googling, or other attempts to connect with people outside the classroom, their grade is toast.

I really would prefer not to spend the next hour looking over the shoulders of hard-working students, but prior encounters with cheaters have made me cautious. My composition classes emphasize writing as a recursive process involving revision, and computers make revision much easier--but they also introduce new problems, not the least of which is misplaced trust in spelling checkers. In the past I have had students use instant messaging to "help" each other during exams, and more than one student has discovered the horrors of losing a finished essay to a technological glitch.

I warn them about these problems in advance, and I remind them that technological difficulties do not excuse late work. Still, many prefer to write on laptops, and I am loath to tell them no. So there they sit, facing the wall, their fingers flying across the keyboard as if writing for their lives. The results will be legible, but will they be coherent? I'll know in an hour--or slightly less.

P.S. Class is over--finally--and the biggest problem was getting the last few students to leave! I kept having this conversation:

"I need more time."
"Time is up."
"But I'm not finished."
"But time is up."
"But I can't write a whole essay in 90 minutes."
"One of the goals of an in-class essay is to assess your ability to organize your ideas and write under pressure. That means when time is up, you turn in your essay."
"But I need more time."
"Everyone would like more time. Turn it in."
"But I'm not finished."
"Another class needs this room. Turn it in."
"But I need more time."

Finally I had to chase the last two students out of the classroom, but they followed me into my office to continue to beg for more time to finish their essays. One refused to leave my office no matter how many times I said "No no no no no!" He would walk out and then walk back in with a big grin on his face and a huge "Please" issuing from his mouth. I don't know how many times I said no before he finally left.

Now I have a big pile of student papers on my desk and two more midterms to give. I need more time.

News of the world

Tonight on a walk up our country road I saw two snakes, one dead and one living; three aptly-named Giant Puffball Mushrooms; a white tree trunk entwined by poison ivy vines bearing brilliant crimson leaves; a garden plot covered with colorful gourds; paw-paws and buckeyes dangling from trees.

No guns. No deranged gunmen. No murdered schoolgirls. No fear.

Out here in the country we feel safe. There are no metal detectors in the local schools, few locks on the neighbors' doors. We hear talk of thefts and hunting accidents, but murder belongs elsewhere, in the hectic cities and their suburbs. What can hurt us out here?

Today's news reminds us that nobody's safe, and it's news I'd rather not face. Instead I seek news of two snakes, three mushrooms, a pretty tree, a garden full of gourds, and a fruitful forest where violence occurs only among non-human beasts.

Desperately seeking dignity

At the beginning of Singin' in the Rain, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) declares that his show-biz career has been characterized by a single-minded devotion to Dignity--but flashbacks suggest otherwise, portraying him as a checkered-suited buffoon willing to do anything for a laugh. It's difficult to maintain dignity while tap-dancing for quarters in the local dive or being pelted by rotten fruit in a grimy Vaudeville theater.

It's also difficult to maintain dignity while reading a pile of student papers analyzing Singin' in the Rain. I love Singin' in the Rain. I love writing about Singin' in the Rain. I love reading about Singin' in the Rain. What I don't love is singing about Singin' in the Rain, but I can't help it: my students' papers infect my brain with all those peppy songs, and the next thing I know I'm sashaying into the classroom singing "Moses supposes his toeses are roses, but Moses supposes erroneously."

That's where dignity flies out the window. English professors are not supposed to sashay down the hall, and we are definitely not supposed to sing nonsensical tongue-twisters while approaching students preparing to take a difficult midterm exam. An English professor who enters the classroom singing about Moses's erroneous supposition re: toeses is unlikely to be looked upon as entirely respectable, particularly if said professor can't carry a tune. Good thing I'm too much of a klutz to attempt to tap-dance. If my students start carrying rotten fruit to class, though, I'm in big trouble.

Fortunately, this Singin' obsession will be over soon and my students will be moving on to the next topic of conversation: The Conversation, a film utterly devoid of peppy tunes and tap-dancing. The only danger is that I might end up creeping stealthily through the halls while mumbling incomprehensibly--in other words, acting like an English professor.

Dignity. Always dignity.

Writher's block

One of my students wrote about an author's unique "writhing style," which is certainly vivid but not quite what she had intended. What would cause a writer to writhe and how would that writhing style be made evident on the page? I'm at a loss for words--perhaps I'm experiencing Writher's Block, for which the remedy is a quick trip to the shores of Catatonia.

Stop the Presses! Attitudes Persist!

"Attitudes Persist on Mental Health," screams the bold black headline on the top of today's front page. I suppose I should be grateful to live in a place where the most newsworthy event of the day is a persistent attitude, but still I have to ask: This is news? Maybe tomorrow's headline will be "Some Things Never Change" and Tuesday's will be "You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Tricks." If attitudes on mental health persist in persisting, perhaps one of these days we'll see today's headline recycled for a second use, or a third or a fourth or a fifth, at which point I'll write a headline of my own: Attitudes Persist on Persistence of "Atittudes Persist."

If nothing else, it's bound to improve my mental health.

Top ten uses for a giant zucchini

1. Ballast.

2. Doorstop.

3. Artillery.

4. Toy, part one: hollow it out and carve the shell into a clever little dollhouse. Glue tiny button eyes onto walnuts to make "people."

5. Toy, part two: Carefully hollow out two giant zucchinis and duct-tape together to form a jet pack that can be strapped onto a child's back. Pour diet coke into the hollowed-out zucchinis and drop in an entire package of Mentos. Stand back and watch little Jimmy soar!

6. Hair-styling aide: wrap wet hair around zucchini; secure with toothpicks; leave zucchini in overnight; brush out hair to make soft, flowing curls.

7. Sports paraphernalia: send giant zucchinis to underprivileged inner-city youths, who will split them in half, hollow them out, and use them in place of cestas in their impromptu games of jai-alai.

8. Amusement-park equipment: who says the bumpers on bumper cars need to be made of rubber? Zucchini is cheap, non-polluting, and readily available during the summer months.

9. Edible prosthetic limbs: stuck at a neverending lunchtime meeting? You'll be the envy of salivating co-workers when you lean down and take a nibble from near the knee.

10. Personal spiritual enhancement: grate zucchini, measure into freezer bags, and store in freezer. Pray fervently for a power outage, and then shout Hallelujah when you have to throw out all that zucchini.

The Drippy Swimsuit Mystery

Today's mystery: why is a wet green one-piece women's swimsuit hanging from a hook on the door of the supply cabinet in the English department office?

It can't be the secretary's swimsuit because (a) she's out of town at a conference and (b) when she shows up for work in a wet swimsuit, it will be a sure sign that the apocalypse is at hand.

I suppose it could belong to a faculty member, someone (a) whose idea of "professional attire" extends to swimwear and (b) who is willing to wear a wet swimsuit in a building where the temperature hovers right around the "meat locker" level. I hope all of my colleagues are smarter than that.

For that matter, I hope my students are smarter than that too, although I notice that the young men seem to believe that wearing shorts and flip-flops all winter long is a sign of virility. These students, though, are not the type to wear a woman's green maillot, no matter how far the temperature drops.

But I am forgetting one thing: whoever hung the wet swimsuit in our office has presumably changed into more appropriate clothes, so we're not looking for someone who is clueless about what to wear in a classroom building but someone who is confused about the proper location for hanging wet clothes. That could be anyone.

The final mystery is this: how did a wet swimsuit materialize on a campus that has no pool? Has someone been taking a dip in some big puddles, or did the provost finally approve the installation of a whirlpool in the Secret Faculty Spa? If that's the case, that green swimsuit is MINE.

Don't Panic Day

It's an unusual day on our campus, and not just because some of my colleagues are wearing jeans and plaid flannel instead of their normally natty attire. It's Pandemic Day, except we're not supposed to call it Pandemic Day but something less frightening like Emergency Test Day, but I announced to my classes that I'm calling it Don't Panic Day. I for one am definitely not panicking. For one thing, I don't have time to panic. How can I possibly be so busy on a day when I'm not actually meeting with my classes?

Except I am meeting with them--just not face-to-face. All professors are supposed to be conducting their classes via "alternative means" today, except for those that can't possibly afford to eschew face-to-face meetings for one day. My African-American Lit students read a classmate's paper and responded to it via e-mail, and very insightful those responses were. My film class watched part of Singin' in the Rain and had a sort of slow-motion e-mail discussion of particular techniques. Almost everyone participated and no one cared what anyone else was wearing.

Best of all, though, no one actually had to get sick. In my book, the best kind of Pandemic Day is the one on which I can mark the pandemic absent.

Pulling the plug on the grading machine

Yesterday afternoon I became a paper-grading machine, cranking out grades the way those faceless workers in Fritz Lang's Metropolis crank out--well, whatever it is that big machine is intended to crank out. Misery would be my guess. At one point I read a sentence asserting that in Sunset Boulevard Norma Desmond is "self-diluted," and I had to look at the phrase for a while before I figured out what was wrong with it.

That's when it's time to stop grading. I pulled the plug on the paper-grading machine and set out to dilute myself. Hot tea works wonders on a deluded mind.

Random Winkworthy Esq.

I must have looked particularly winkworthy Friday because two people I do not know openly and obviously winked at me in public. Why? Did someone tape a sign to my back saying "Wink if you love adverbs"? I don't often receive winks from total strangers and the only strangers at whom I wink with any frequency are toddlers sitting in grocery carts--there's nothing like an unprovoked wink to make a toddler giggle.

But I am not a toddler so I greeted today's two winks not with giggles but with puzzlement. What specific elements make a person particularly winkworthy? It's a mystery to me. Whatever those people were winking about, I wish they'd let me in on the secret.

Been there, done that, bought the soundtrack

Today a student in my film class commented on how fantastic life would be if we all had our own soundtracks: everywhere we would go, music would follow, and not just any music but music to express the appropriate mood. Yes, I said, but unless we were all equipped with mute buttons, public gatherings would be cacophanous, with dissonant snippets of music constantly competing for attention.

But wait! This already happens every day--with cell phones! The ringtone is the equivalent of a personal soundtrack expressing information about our lives, our values, and how we feel about the people who call us. I'm waiting for the day when someone makes a movie in which the entire soundtrack consists of little unrelated snippets of music bursting out incongruously--but wait! It's already been done! It's called Moulin Rouge!

Rats. All the great ideas are already taken.

Welcome to my WebWorld

Shots from last Saturday's ramble.

Can you save this sentence?

"In the publication Inventing Popular Culture, the author's purpose is to demonstrate that the current term 'Popular Culture' is the current derogatory term used by the elite in control of society to try to downgrade and keep underfoot the mass of society who support those who, by hook or by crook and other devious means, have usurped power."

I've been struggling to disentangle this sentence ever since I encountered it last night. First, let's get rid of the obvious redundancies. Let's assume that "the current term" does not need to be repeated, that "by hook or by crook" includes the idea of "other devious means," and that a "derogatory term" is, by defintion, a term used to "downgrade" others. Let's also tighten up the syntax in the opening phrase and replace "the elite in control of society" with something more concise. This gives us a sentence something like this:

"The author of Inventing Popular Culture proposes to demonstrate that 'Popular Culture' is the current term used by the powerful elite to denigrate and dominate the mass of society who support those who, by hook or by crook, have usurped power."

This makes the syntax a bit more straightforward, but it does not clarify the content. Who are the "elite in control of society" and how do they differ from "those who, by hook or by crook, have usurped power"? The sentence seems to be saying that powerful people use the term "popular culture" to denigrate those who have put them into power, which is an interesting insight except I'm not sure it's what the author intended. Clearly, this sentence is desperately in need of attention from an editor.

But wait--this sentence was subject to the attention of an editor! It appeared not in one of my students' papers but in an academic journal, and it was written by a respected senior scholar! Who am I to subject an academic demigod to this kind of critique! I should be ashamed!

Well, someone should be ashamed, but far be it from me to name names.

P.S. Send money

I see in the papers that a businessman has donated over TEN MILLION DOLLARS to the writing center at Miami University, and I wonder: how can our writing center get hold of money like that? In this case the donor noticed that a large number of job applicants suffered from very poor writing skills, so he decided to improve the quality of his applicant pool by donating money to Miami U's writing center. This suggests that if we want someone to make a big donation--and it need not be $10 million; we'd settle for one-tenth of that--what we need to do is foist upon the public a plethora of graduates whose writing skills would make a human resource manager run screaming from the room. Eventually, someone is bound to notice and donate some big bucks.

Dr. Peeve

Lately I've been experiencing a very third-grade-teacher sort of feeling. I keep hearing this peevish voice issuing from my mouth saying things like "I'll close the door at 8:00 a.m. and anyone who is not here at that time will be counted absent and will receive a 0 on the assignment." I don't like myself when I say things like this, and neither do my students, who are convinced that they cannot be here at 8:00 because they have to print their assignments in the computer lab across the hall, which doesn't open until 8:00. This inspires me to achieve levels of sarcasm lost on students still wiping sleepy-dust out of their eyes.

I hate treating college students like mischievous third-graders, but on the other hand, it's difficult to run an orderly and productive classroom when one-third of the students regularly wander in late. If I keep channeling my third-grade teacher, one of these days I'll show up in class with glittery cat's-eye glasses on a chain around my neck, a white linen handkerchief stuffed up my sleeve, and masses of white hair piled up in a bun on top of my head. There must be a better way!

My 54 cents' worth

Just after midnight last night, with no balloons or confetti or fanfare, this site received its 4000th visit. I didn't stay up to celebrate the auspicious event but now I'm wondering where I go to pick up my valuable prizes. There ought to be valuable prizes. A popular blog-rating service estimates that my blog is worth exactly $564.54, but I don't know how to collect on that promise. If nothing else, I could use the 54 cents.

Webbed wonders

A perfect morning for photographing spider webs: a blanket of fog held the dew on the upper meadow long after the sun came up, illuminating elaborate webs that are virtually invisible in broad daylight. It was quiet as death outside until I crossed the line of pine trees at the edge of the meadow, at which point a mob of raucous crows loudly issued a Clumsy Biped Warning.

I saw a lovely pair of red-bellied woodpeckers but no other living creature larger than a spider, not even the scrawny stray cat that has been hanging around outside our house for the past week trying to sneak in for a visit with our indoor cat. The stray sits on the back deck looking longingly through the window while we enjoy our supper on the other side; its offerings of dead chipmunks have so far failed to persuade us to open the door. This morning the cat was not visible.

But the spiderwebs were, all glimmery and sparkly with dew. I shot a roll of film and came back with wet shoes and pants drenched to the knee and, as an added bonus, a spider in my hair. Not bad for an early-morning ramble.

A passion for apostrophes

"Our sport is your sports punishment," proclaimed the T-shirt worn by one of my students this morning, and I got the point but nevertheless I was overwhelmed by a mad desire to insert an apostrophe: "Our sport is your sport's punishment." If I'd had a permanent marker handy, I might have done it.

It's a curse, I tell you. If I could stop caring about the correct placement of apostrophes, my life would be much less stressful; I could glance right past that T-shirt without a pang instead of investing emotional energy in the absent apostrophe. I could read student papers that leave apostrophes out of you're, we're, and it's all day long without banging my head against the wall. Why can't I just stop caring?

The other solution, of course, would be for the rest of the world to just learn how to use apostrophes correctly. It's not that difficult, people! You can do this! But you'd better do it quickly because I have a permanent marker and I'm not afraid to use it!

On the road to obsolescence

I was not surprised this morning when my freshman students asked, "Who's Tonto?" They had read the Sherman Alexie essay "I Hated Tonto (Still Do)," which I have taught before so I knew that I would have to spend the first few minutes of the discussion describing the Lone Ranger and Tonto and explaining that before the era of washboard abs it was not unusual for a television hero to look like Clayton Moore. It made me feel old to know that my students do not possess any mental image of Tonto, but then I took a look at their writing assignments and realized that they do possess mental images of many pop-culture figures who are largely mythical to me.

Jessica Alba, for instance. I've heard the name and I'm sure I've seen the face, but when I try to retrieve a mental image, I come up blank. Likewise Doreamon, who is apparently some sort of cartoon character. Ask me about Foghorn Leghorn or Hong Kong Phooey! I can tell you all about Grizzly Adams, Colonel Klink, or Max Smart, but who is this Meredith Gray and why should I care? A student who wrote about the omnipresence of Oprah asked whether I enjoy her show; I confessed that I have seen Oprah's talk show only once, when I was in the hospital giving birth to a kid who is now 17 years old, so I'm probably not the best person to ask.

It's tempting to think of students as pits of ignorance ready to be filled with the founts of knowledge possessed by professors, but apparently ignorance is a two-way street (and a mixed metaphor too, but let's move on). Today my students learned a little something about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, but I also learned something: that I'm not the only one in the room who knows a thing or two and that someday they will be the experts and I'll be obsolete.

News to me

I passed a group of students marveling over the Wall Street Journal as if they'd never seen a real newspaper before. "These people are crazy," said one student. "How can they find this much news in one day?"

The journalist in me wants to tell these students about all the stuff that gets left out of the newspaper in one day, while the teacher in me wants to educate them about the process that turns raw material into articles aimed at a particular audience. Meanwhile, the old fogey in me wants to know how these young people managed to reach adulthood without daily exposure to huge volumes of newsprint, and the newspaper junkie in me wants to grab that Wall Street Journal right out of their hands and start reading.

These people are crazy. How can they not find this much news in one day?

Poison pest letter

When I arrived home yesterday I encountered a recumbent tree blocking the driveway with the resident woodsman standing nearby holding a chainsaw. I wanted to run over and give him a big hug, but instead I said, "Don't touch anything until you've had a shower!" The tree, you see, was infested with poison ivy.

I don't know what kind of tree it was because I never noticed leaves on it other than the poison ivy that spread through the canopy. Snaking up the trunk was a poison ivy vine as thick as my arm, and the vine spread far enough to produce luxuriant green growth in the summer; it was only when you looked closely that you noticed what kind of leaves they were.

Our first year here, my woodsman severed the poison ivy vine and sprayed it with poison ivy killer, but it took a while before it all died off--and only then could we see just how dead the tree really was. It was close to the house so it had to come down, but who wants to mess with a poison ivy tree?

For such a time as this I keep a skilled woodsman around the house. He cut down the tree and started chopping it up, although we don't plan to burn any of it in the fireplace this winter for fear of inhaling poison ivy fumes. That's one more pest out of my life--and one terrific woodsman worthy of a hug.

But only after a shower.

Something's coming

Anyone who spends any time attending high school marching band competitions quickly becomes aware of the West Side Story Rule: at every competition at least one band will feature music from West Side Story. I've been a loyal band parent for seven years now and I have seen many bands take a stab at the music, with results ranging from outrageous to charming to spectacular. Now I love West Side Story; before I was 12 years old I knew all the words to all the songs and I can still sing most of them, albeit off-key--but that doesn't necessarily mean I want to hear a marching band play the music every Saturday from now until November.

It started yesterday at the first competition of the season when a band opened its show with "Something's Coming," long a fixture in the Unsingable Song Hall of Fame--and if its odd intervals and unsettling rhythms make it virtually unsingable, I don't know why anyone would try to march to it. Nevertheless those band members in bulky polyester uniforms with bits of braid and plumed hats obediently charged about the field playing tubas and clarinets and bass drums to "Something's Coming," and then they went on from there. Instead of focusing on songs of conflict, this band selected the more tender love songs from West Side Story; they get points for originality, but I'm not sure how a band is supposed to march to the delicate "I Feel Pretty" without looking like a troupe of dancing hippos.

This band performs in many of the same competitions as my son's band, so I expect to see their show several more times before November--and at some larger competitions, there may be even more bands playing music from West Side Story. After November, I don't care how many bands decide to play music from West Side Story because this season marks the end of my career as a Band Parent. The air is hummin' and something great is comin'--but meanwhile, I've got one more season of West Side Story.

Steamed about wrinkles

I was certain that my daughter was the only person in the universe who actually enjoyed ironing until I mentioned this strange characteristic to my mom. "I've always liked to iron," she said. "It's soothing," she added, which is exactly how my daughter had described ironing. Is there some genetic component behind the enjoyment of ironing, and if so, why did it skip me? Surely I'm not the only one who considers ironing a preview of purgatory.

I remember as a child watching my mother's elaborate ironing procedure, which required starch, spray bottles, and the willingness to roll up damp dress shirts and stash them in the refrigerator. (Why? It's a mystery.) She took such great care with collars, cuffs, and sleeves that her white nursing uniforms and my father's dress shirts always looked worthy of hanging in the Ironing Hall of Fame.

Nothing I iron ever looks that good, despite the benefits of wrinkle-resistant fabrics and a high-tech iron, which is why I've always been happy to let my daughter do the ironing. Of course I pay her, but I have a feeling she'd iron for pleasure even if I weren't making it worth her while. As I look at the huge pile of wrinkled shirts and khaki pants begging for attention, I wonder whether there's a way to mail my ironing pile to my daughter and get it back looking pristine. It would give her pleasure to do my ironing--and she would certainly be the only student on campus getting her mom's laundry in the mail!

Well groomed

I saw a sign posted on the side of a building today, "$5 off First Groom," and I wondered: does he come with a tux or is formalwear extra? What about warranties? Technical support? Trade-ins? How much can I get for a slightly used model with a few dents that still runs reasonably well?

But then I went around to the front and saw that the building is not a matchmaking den but a dog grooming establishment. Ah well, I'm not really interested in trading in my old model anyway, five bucks or no five bucks.

WWSD?

Today I encountered a remarkable human drama in the "Dear Prudence" column in Slate:
http://www.slate.com/id/2148988/

The question, in a nutshell, is this: Should I tell my new girlfriend that I accidentally caused the death of her father 20 years ago? The details are evocative: a dark night, a 12-year-old hiding in a cornfield, an ear of corn hitting its mark, tires squealing, metal meeting tree--and the rest is silence. Twenty years later, romance blooms and the dark night of the corn threatens to disrupt the course of true love.

This situation, it seems to me, is fraught with potential for the kind of drama that ought to be played out on a stage larger than an online advice column. So I'm issuing a challenge to my students and I'll issue it here too: What Would Shakespeare Do? I'm accepting plot outlines, character descriptions, or other creative suggestions about how Shakespeare would handle this thrilling drama of romance, anguish, and flying vegetables.

On the road to eccentricity

Yesterday one of my senior colleagues was decrying the dearth of notably eccentric professors on campus. "Gone are the days when the campus eccentric could be counted on daily to stash his pipe in his pocket while it was still burning," he said. "Where have all the eccentric characters gone?"

He suggested that the provost seek out eccentricity in new hires, but it's hard to include that kind of requirement in an advertisement--and besides, why look outside the campus when we have plenty of potential characters already here? This campus could be crawling with potential eccentrics; we just need to find a way to encourage the formation of eccentricity.

To increase the campus Eccentricity Quotient (EQ), I propose that the provost promote a multi-phase Eccentricity Encouragement Program (EEP) involving Personal Eccentricity Reinforcement Grants (PERP), an annual Professorial Eccentricity Prize (PEP), workshops on Boosting Your Eccentricity (BYE), and visits to other campuses to observe professorial eccentricity in the wild (You want another acronym? Write it yourself!).

Once that's all in place, we'll just need a few professors to step up and respond to the Eccentricity Challenge--and I can think of no better test case than the senior colleague who sparked the idea. He'd look pretty good smoking a pipe, and besides, on the road to eccentricity, he's already got a pretty good head start on the rest of us. So go for it, buddy! We'll be right behind you!

Throw out the life-line

I had a baffling encounter with a foreign student this morning: I speak quickly and he speaks quietly, and together we managed to totally confuse one another. I stand in the front of the class and babble at a breakneck pace about news events and pop-culture icons of whom he is only vaguely aware; he sits in the back of the class and looks around as if hoping to pick clues out of the air, and then he approaches me after class and asks questions in a voice so soft I have to lean forward and ask for repetitions. I use a lot of humor, sometimes so subtle no one knows how to respond, but even the broadest laugh lines leave him baffled. Two weeks into the semester he's utterly at sea and I don't know what kind of rope I ought to toss, but I've got to do something. I can't just let the kid drown.

Traveling companion

The only thing worse than having a spider in the car is having a spider in the car and not knowing where it is, which is why I tried very hard to keep an eye on the spider on the dashboard while I drove to work this morning. It was a foggy morning and visibility was pretty low, so I really needed to keep both eyes on the road, but instead I alternated: look at the spider, look at the road; look at the spider, look at the road; wonder what kind of spider it is--small and brown like a recluse, but does it have that mark on its back? Impossible to tell.

Look at the spider, look at the road. Wonder if this is the same spider that jumped on my neck while I was driving home in the pitch dark and the rain the other night, the one I brushed off quickly but probably didn't manage to kill and couldn't see enough to tell where it went. Look at the spider.

Look at the road. Look at the spider, look at the road. Look at the--where's the spider? Last I saw it was crawling across the dash from right to left, way out of arm's reach; now it's gone.

Look at the road.

Don't think about the spider.

I love a parade

There are advantages to living in a town small enough to have a Labor Day parade. For one thing, every labor union in the county sends its members marching through town in matching T-shirts, so on that one day of the year it's possible to know exactly where to find a plumber.

The parade also keeps the local politicians out of trouble for an hour or so as they walk the parade route with their supporters distributing campaign leaflets and armloads of candy. I'm a little confused about the message some of these politicians choose to send, though. For instance, one float was crawling with very small children wearing matching T-shirts urging me to vote for a particular candidate. They were awfully cute, but what rational person seeks political insight from a trailer full of three-year-olds?

I'm always tempted to select candidates based on the cars they send through the parade. Big blue Caddies don't inspire my trust and bunting-motivated SUV's are just so last Wednesday, but I was impressed by an adorable Model T stumping for a candidate. Today's parade featured four Mustangs touting various candidates, and while I found the two late-model red convertibles a bit flashy, I wouldn't mind voting for the candidate whose posters festooned the 1966 model.

There's plenty of royalty in the parade--pork princesses and rabbit queens and a Little Prince candidate who couldn't stop chomping on an immense wad of pink gum--and plenty of opportunities for people to wear funny hats, from rhinestone tiaras to red Shriner fezes to marching band hats with quivering plumes.

And then there's all that candy. Marching bands and floats and Shriners in funny hats aren't enough; today's parade-viewing public really wants to take home an Wal-Mart bag full of Tootsie Rolls, Smarties, and Jolly Ranchers. Who cares about 76 trombones when you've got people throwing candy to the masses? And if some of that candy is being tossed from a big tank truck advertising a septic tank cleaning service, nobody minds. One day out of the year, even the septic tank truck can be the center of attention.

Will the whimsy police visit PMLA?

I finally got far enough in my summer reading pile to reach the May 2006 PMLA, which includes a higher-than-normal percentage of articles that I felt compelled to read. Gregory Jackson's article on homiletic novels is pretty interesting, as are Juniper Ellis's exploration of tattoos in Samoan literature and Paul Acker's "Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf."

Best of all, though, is the round-table discussion titled "What Can a Journal Essay Do?" It's punchy, clever, accessible, and full of information so helpful I read part of it to a class full of upper-level literature students making their first foray into literary theory. (There's actually a cheesy acronym! In PMLA!)

Here is the paragraph I appreciated most, from Marianne DeKoven:

I would add that people shouldn't think they have to write a PMLA essay with a kind of high seriousness. I mean I think there's a sense that a PMLA article means that you are speaking from on high, you're laying down the law, to the profession. It can be whimsical; it can be daring and imaginative. We want to read interesting articles. We enjoy reading imaginative, engaged, well-written articles that feel passionately about their subject and are not just dry and careful; in fact, dry and careful is not what we're looking for, as I see it.

Important if true--and if this issue's articles are any indication, it may just be true.

Someother word

One of my students wrote a sentence using the word someother, as in The guy hit someother's head. I ought to go ahead and bleed red ink all over it, but I keep thinking how useful it would be to add someother to the dictionary. Someother is far more sleek and elegant than the obvious alternative, somebody else. The guy hit somebody else's head: it's just clunky. I think I'll take someother out for a spin and see how it runs.

Make meetings memorable

1. Install karaoke machines in all meeting rooms and change the bylaws so that no one can amend a motion without first singing a selection from Dave Barry's list of all-time worst rock songs. Anyone attempting to amend an amendment would be required to sing "Stuck in the Middle with You" all the way through.

2. Stock up on duct tape. Used judiciously, it can prevent all manner of meaningless blather.

3. Hire a local actor to burst into the room and sobbingly accuse the chairperson of unspeakable acts involving shrimp forks, absinthe, and a clown named Doodles.

4. Write the agenda in code and toss a few decoder rings into a large vat of green Jello. Start the meeting with a game of Bobbing for Decoders. The loser is required to read the minutes of the previous meeting in pig-Latin.

5. Rig up a cellphone with an inappropriate and immature ringtone: the sound of bleating sheep, for instance, or a couple experiencing sexual ecstasy. Before the meeting starts, hide the phone in the chairperson's briefcase. The minute the chair utters the words "This isn't on the agenda, but--," dial the number.

6. When there is no question, call the question; when there's no motion on the table, move to table the motion. This ought to provide a good old-fashioned squabble among those attendees who know (or think they know) Robert's Rules of Order. Onlookers can amuse themselves by placing bets on the outcome.

7. Insist that untenured committee members address the Chair as "O Great and Exalted Fount of All Wisdom" while the Chair addresses each untenured attendee as "Wart."

8. Provide scissors and paste so that attendees can cut up multi-color handouts and glue them together to make colorful garlands of interlocking rings--or go all out with glitter, paint, and macaroni.

9. Install chairs equipped with electrodes that will administer small electrical shocks to attendees' keisters. Have attendees take turns running the controller.

10. Focus on a specific purpose; hear only from those people who can contribute relevant information in pursuit of that purpose; and when the purpose is achieved, go home.

Nah, it'll never work.

Brand X

The Powers That Be keep talking about branding, as in "What is our brand?" This makes me envision rounding up all our students in a huge muddy corral and plunging red-hot twisted iron into their flesh--but what does the brand look like? What mark can we leave on students that will make people say, "Yep, that's one of theirs"? I'm accepting suggestions.

Freds in webs

This morning I opened the door to leave for work and found the way blocked by an intricate spider web stretching across the entire opening--and sitting in the middle was the web's maker, Fred.

I doubt that Fred is his actual name--or hers, as the case may be. Its Latin name is Argiope Aurantia, aka Yellow Garden Spider, but our family calls all spiders of this species Fred in memory of a spider we once kept as a pet. Well, "kept" is perhaps not the right word; Fred had made a lovely web along the path beside the house, and we were all in the habit of visiting daily and dropping interesting things into his web. Or hers.

Sometimes we dropped live insects and sometimes we dropped bits of leaf just to see Fred scurry across the web in hot pursuit of a juicy treat. Fred hung around for a while but then disappeared, but not before he (or she!) became a beloved member of the family.

Now we live in a place where Freds abound. The photo was taken in our upper meadow, which is crawling with Freds this time of year. We still enjoy seeing them, but as much fun as it might be to drop small wiggly things into the webs and watch the Freds scurry, I'm not volunteering to walk into the web myself. Which is why I shut the door and called for the resident web-destroyer. Freds outside are fine and dandy, but when they invade my space, it's time to render Fred homeless.

Sounds of silence

I encountered a lot of silence in the classroom this morning. Some of it was desirable: the silence that descends on a classroom full of students writing for dear life. But before they wrote, I tried to get them talking, and that's when I encountered the other kind of silence.

Maybe they're not awake yet, I thought. After all, the class begins at 8 a.m., a time when I'm still absorbing my morning quota of caffeine. Maybe they just don't know each other well enough to feel comfortable sharing ideas. Then again, they didn't even laugh at my jokes! That's the kind of silence that makes me nervous.

Oh well, there's always next time. Meanwhile, I enjoyed the delicious silence that descended on the class while they were writing. Pens and pencils scratching and scribbling--there is no silence more soothing.

Hope for the three-legged person

I was examining the small print on a shoe box in order to determine whether the shoes were made of real leather or faux when I encountered the following statement: "Average Contents: 2."

This was rather disturbing, suggesting that some boxes may contain more than two shoes and some may contain fewer. In order to make a wise decision about my purchase, I need to know the range of values and the standard deviation.

A shoebox containing negative number of shoes is difficult to envision, so let's set the lower end of the range at 0. What, then, is the highest number of shoes that could fit in the box?

The answer would depend, of course, upon the size of the shoes. The box in question could not accommodate more than four of my son's size 14 shoes, but what if you used toddler-size shoes? Barbie shoes? Shoes designed for unicellular organisms? The number could easily reach into the millions.

Now suppose you are the unlucky shopper who takes home a box with only one shoe in it. If $69.95 is an absurd amount of money to spend on two glorified sneakers, it's doubly absurd to spend that amount on only one, so naturally you will return to the store and complain. The store manager, in turn, will point to the small print on the shoebox and say, "What are you complaining about? It says right here that 2 is the average number of shoes in a box. Actual numbers may vary. Some settling of contents may occur. Void where prohibited. Have a nice day!"

But then suppose you take home the box containing 1,000,000 shoes visible only with a high-powered microscope. Lucky you! You've struck the jackpot! Your unicellular organisms will worship you! But what are you going to put on your own feet?

Since I'm interested in buying neither one nor 1,000,000 shoes, I'm not sure what to do with the phrase "Average Contents: 2." If I want to find really useful information on a shoebox, these shoes are made for walking--to another store.

Good news, bad new

Good news! My van is no longer making that annoying rattling noise suggestive of a loose connection in the exhaust system.
Bad news: It's now making a much more annoying noise suggestive of a total disconnection from the exhaust system.

Good news: we were just a few miles from home when the breach occurred.
Bad news: we had to drive through the Sunday-morning stillness of a small town in a car that sounded like a very loud riding mower badly in need of a tune-up.

Good news: the husband has promised to take my van to the garage today.
Bad news: that means I'm driving the husband's car, which I am constantly tempted to drive off a cliff or decorate with big signs saying "Steal me!"

Good news: his car gets 50 miles to the gallon and has a functioning exhaust system.
Bad news: it shakes the fillings out of my teeth and smells like dirty sweat socks, and getting in and out of that car requires the dexterity of a gymnast--I certainly wouldn't attempt it in a skirt.

Good news: I made it to work without succumbing to temptation and now I don't have to think about that car for a good eight hours.
Bad news: at the end of the day when I'm ready to collapse, that car won't be. It keeps going and going and going. That is, in fact, its only redeeming quality. So I guess that's good news after all.

Dinner music

My taste buds are still singing after a meal 0f Thai fish curry and coconut rice topped with chopped Thai peppers (fresh from the garden) and pistachios briefly fried in very hot oil suffused with garlic, ginger, and more hot peppers, a meal we won't soon forget, particularly since I once again neglected to wear gloves while chopping the hot peppers. But here's what I wonder: who decided that the appropriate music to accompany this meal was a recording of the mayor's bluegrass band playing and singing "My Mama Cooked Groundhog" and "Eat More Possum"?

Calling all cliches

It's Friday afternoon.

Classes start Monday.

I need a cliche.

Is this the calm before the storm or the storm before the calm?

Are we poised on the brink of a precipice, stepping over a new threshold, or setting out into unknown territory?

Are we filling a bucket, lighting a torch, or dowsing the torch in the bucket?

Will we stand on the shoulders of giants or boldly go where no man has gone before? (If the latter, I'm taking Chapstick.)

Will we seize the day, soar with the eagles, or sink like a rock?

The possibilities are endless. And so, apparently, are the cliches.

Things I learned at an all-day meeting

1. Our college is "bricky"--not that there's anything wrong with that!

2. No matter how I dress for a long meeting, at some point I'll be either too hot or too cold. Yesterday I was both.

3. The pandemic is coming! The pandemic is coming! Whatever you do, don't panic!

4. No matter how many times I see "health care" written as "healthcare," I can't get used to it. When did the phrase become one word?

5. And don't even get me started on "wellness."

6. The Law of Conservation of Curmudgeonliness* continues to work: the retirement of an old fart creates a vacuum into which a somewhat less old faculty member is inexorably sucked. There's nothing like an all-day meeting to reveal the identity of the new suckees.

7. Good things will happen this year! Or else!

*Clarification: this law works at a variety of speeds depending on the amount of suction; sometimes a new curmudgeon is sucked into the role immediately after a retirement, and sometimes the process takes months or years. Therefore, it is difficult for outside observers to detect the line from the retiring curmudgeon to the replacement.

How many stooges?

By now we've all heard about the recent poll showing that more Americans can identify the Three Stooges than the three branches of government. I'm sure there will be much wringing of hands over this unfortunate statistic, but there must be a bright side. Let's face it: as long as most Americans can tell the difference between the Three Stooges and the three branches of government, all is not lost; when they start merging into one entity, then we're in big trouble.

Baloney with everything

"Baloney with everything," I said, following the lead of my three colleagues who had just uttered the identical phrase. I don't know how they managed to convince me that my life would not be complete without at least once trying the fried baloney sandwich at a popular local lunchspot, but when they ordered their baloney with everything, I repeated their mantra.

But "baloney with everything" is too good a phrase to waste on a sandwich, no matter how special. Think of the groups that could adopt it as their motto: freshman composition students, advertising copywriters, parents inclined to give lectures in the "In my day young people knew how to respect their elders" pattern. As I prepare my syllabi for my fall courses, though, I am tempted to turn the motto around: "Everything without baloney." Not a bad motto for a student--or for a sandwich either.

All thumbs and not enough eyes

What I need when I take the camera into the upper meadow is an extra pair of eyes, or perhaps several. I can watch the path or the camera or the surroundings, but I can't watch them all at once, as I discovered today while trying to take a photo of the preying mantis that was posing photogenically in a milkweed patch beside the path. I kept my eyes pinned to the mantis while changing lenses and while stooping to get a better angle on the mantis's perky little triangular face, but then the camera bag went rolling down the hill and I looked away for half a second and when I looked back the mantis was gone. But then along came a consolation prize--a lovely big black swallowtail butterfly that shimmered in the sunlight. I started following it with the lens, shifting here and there to get the right angle, my eyes glued to the camera, which is how I finally found myself standing in the middle of a patch of poison ivy. And I didn't even get the shot.

What I need is an entrouage: one person to go ahead of me and clear out the poison ivy, another to stay by my side and carry the camera bag, another to scan the surroundings for photogenic flora and fauna, another to follow behind and pick up whatever I happen to drop. With eight extra eyes, I'd be certain to get some good shots. Of course my entourage would also bring eight extra thumbs that could wander unintentionally into great shots and eight extra feet for me to trip over, and how would I pay all their salaries? They wouldn't have to stop any bullets, but the kind of person who would take the poison ivy for me wouldn't come cheap.

So maybe an entourage is out of the question, but how about a factotum? I've always wanted a factotum, but the species is rare and difficult to spot in the wild. To find one, I'd need an extra pair of eyes--or maybe several.

A new twist in the news cycle

You know you live in the sticks when the big news on the front page is "[Our Town] makes national headlines." Let me get this straight: we're so plum tickled that Our Town ended up in other newspapers' headlines that we have to issue urgent headlines announcing the fact, so that now we're covering other news organizations' coverage of our event? This sort of gives a new twist to the phrase "News Cycle."

Headlines like these exist primarily because it's difficult for an entire town to jump up and down and shriek, "Look, Ma, I'm on TV!" This urge to have one's existence validated is familiar to anyone who has ever worked as a journalist. In my previous life as a small-town journalist, I frequently faced this desire for validation in its rawest form. Any photographer gets accustomed to having children call out "Take my picture," but I never minded that so much as the devoted mothers who believed that the newspaper could somehow validate their lives by providing full coverage of little Junior's every minor accomplishment--and if the newspaper failed to meet their high standards of coverage, who got the complaints? I did. Once a mother called and cursed me because I had failed to personally cover her son's Eagle Scout ceremony, and her anger abated only a bit when I told her I had been forced to pay an unexptected visit to the emergency room. Another mother unhappy with how her precious son had been portrayed in the news called me and threatened the lives of my children.

All they wanted me to do was to validate their existence, but what I wanted to tell these women (and the many ohers like them) was this: If you want something validated, go somewhere else; I can't even validate your parking ticket. It's just a newspaper. And if the only way you can feel good about yourself is to have your name or photo printed in a newspaper that will tomorrow be used to line a birdcage, you've got more problems than any newspaper can solve.

The same could be said of Our Town today. One of the reasons I love this place is that nothing terribly earth-shaking ever happens here, but that doesn't mean we have to act like total rubes when something does. Right now Our Town is in the news and some people think that makes us pretty special; personally, I think we're pretty special anyway and we certainly don't need CNN to tell us so.

Adjective animal

Why exactly is it considered appropriate for grocery stores to be named Big Bear or Giant Eagle but not, say, Immense Opossum, Enormous Ibis, or Tremendous Toad?

Lacking gravitas

David Sedaris, in "Monie Changes Everything": "Walls were papered in satin stripes, and curtains fell from floor to ceiling, bordered by what were later identified as swags."

All right, Mr. Sedaris, hand over the swags and listen up. Tell me, Mr. Sedaris, when the curtains were falling from the floor to the ceiling, where, exactly, was the law of gravity? Bound and gagged in a dark closet? And if the law of gravity was disabled in reference to the curtains, what kept the narrator, the folding card table, and the potty-chair rooted so firmly to the floor? Superglue?

Shame shame, Mr. Sedaris. I'm afraid I'll have to write you up. Selectively disabling the law of gravity is a serious violation that may lead to revocation of your Poetic License.

Have a nice day.

Pass the fireflyswatter

"Burn with a gem-like flame," they said, so I'm burning already, but on the flame intensity meter I seem to be stuck at "firefly," which is a hassle because fireflies glow in code and no one gave me the key. Now what am I supposed to do with all these fireflies hovering about?

Dream on

I've just had to hand a sticky writing problem over to my subconscious and I am reminded of the two times just this summer when different colleagues have challenged the wisdom of just such a move. "You've got to be joking," they say, or "No one works that way." I do, and I know I'm not the only one.

Here's how it works: suppose I get stuck at a particular point in a writing project and no matter how I approach it, it just gets more muddled. Instead of continuing to beat my head against the wall, I walk away and leave the problem behind, focusing instead on something totally unrelated. Sleep is best, but a long walk in the woods or an encounter with a kitchen full of fresh vegetables will work just as well; the primary requirement is that whatever I'm doing must engage my full attention and have absolutely no relation to the writing project.

Then when I go back to the problem, what do I find? The answer. I can't count the number of times I've handed a problem over to my subconscious only to wake up the next morning knowing the perfect way to fix it. If I could bottle this ability and put it on the open market, I'd be on my way to an exotic island paradise (preferably not located in Lake Erie). If I can do this, why not everyone else?

Maybe they've never tried. Maybe we need a series of periodic mandatory national drills in which workaholics will be confronted by armed enforcers hollering, "Put your hands in the air and walk away from the problem. Don't look back! Let it go! Now, take a few deep breaths and get into this scuba gear."

I know I'm dreaming. Not that that's a bad thing. Dreaming may be just what I need right about now, because when I wake up I expect to find an answer. How about you?

Timber!

Today was a day of briefcases falling from the sky, not to mention trees. Okay, they didn't exactly fall from the sky, but it certainly felt that way. Years ago I got rid of a badly used and abused briefcase--I might have sold it at a moving sale or donated it to Goodwill--and today it came back to me, minus all the scuffs and scratches. It's not the perfect briefcase but it came to me out of the blue: my wonderful colleague picked it up at a yard sale. It's spacious and serviceable and, best of all, it saves me from having to make any difficult decisions about a new briefcase any time soon.

The trees, on the other hand, really were falling from the sky. Tree trimmers were on campus all day, blocking paths and lopping limbs with great abandon. I was tempted more than once to make off with a few cords of stacked wood, but sadly, they wouldn't fit in my new briefcase.