Drop by drop by drop.
It was raining when I awoke this morning, and it is raining as I put my books aside and get ready to get ready to rest up for my first class. It's the fourth iteration of a class I love dearly; it is a constant in my teaching career here. I feel joyful about teaching it again, but I'm also, perhaps inevitably, restless about whether everything will go smoothly tomorrow.
Today, that restlessness came bounding out of me as irritability and frustration with a whole host of small things gone wrong: mistakes, noises, breakages, injuries. After dinner, I put one of my favorite mugs into the microwave to heat up water for tea (because, remember, my electric kettle blew up two weeks ago). I went off to the bathroom. A minute later, I heard what sounded like the mug's breaking. Returning to the kitchen, I found that the mug was empty. What had happened to the water? ... Had there been water? No indeed. Later, showing my Clevelander student (who is about to depart for Adventures Elsewhere) what had happened to the mug, I ran my index finger over the main crack inside the mug--which, as it turns out, didn't break and fall apart but instead had its glaze shattered in the microwave. Suddenly, I cried out: a splinter of the glaze, or of the ceramic, or something, had lodged itself under the pad of my index finger. It's still there, poking me. I'm hopeful that it will grow out of my skin (unlike the piece of graphite that's still in there, higher up on my fingerprint, a full five years after I accidentally lodged it there after someone's job talk at my old job).
At some point, I decided that I should retreat to my red chair and stop touching anything besides my books and papers, and that decision yielded some good things for tomorrow--as well as a reduced number of breakages for tonight.
I didn't do so much in the way of photography today: the press of time is just so great right now. Everything happens right now, for good and ill.
Today, that restlessness came bounding out of me as irritability and frustration with a whole host of small things gone wrong: mistakes, noises, breakages, injuries. After dinner, I put one of my favorite mugs into the microwave to heat up water for tea (because, remember, my electric kettle blew up two weeks ago). I went off to the bathroom. A minute later, I heard what sounded like the mug's breaking. Returning to the kitchen, I found that the mug was empty. What had happened to the water? ... Had there been water? No indeed. Later, showing my Clevelander student (who is about to depart for Adventures Elsewhere) what had happened to the mug, I ran my index finger over the main crack inside the mug--which, as it turns out, didn't break and fall apart but instead had its glaze shattered in the microwave. Suddenly, I cried out: a splinter of the glaze, or of the ceramic, or something, had lodged itself under the pad of my index finger. It's still there, poking me. I'm hopeful that it will grow out of my skin (unlike the piece of graphite that's still in there, higher up on my fingerprint, a full five years after I accidentally lodged it there after someone's job talk at my old job).
At some point, I decided that I should retreat to my red chair and stop touching anything besides my books and papers, and that decision yielded some good things for tomorrow--as well as a reduced number of breakages for tonight.
I didn't do so much in the way of photography today: the press of time is just so great right now. Everything happens right now, for good and ill.
posted by Dr. S at 11:16 PM
1 Comments:
Happy 1,003rd post!
So, your building is near the new construction site? Ugh. I hope your home library is more peaceful.
I'm looking at my bookshelves, which I emptied out and transferred to my office in anticipation of a subletter, moving all my books up to my office. The shelves at home now look sadly bare. Even if I keep the one nearest my desk relatively free to hold library books for current projects, I've still got four shelves that sit empty, like teeth lost in a bar fight. At about 18 books per shelf, and $30 per book, it will cost me about $2,000 to feel like a real scholar again at home.
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