So, my day started by waking up to this disturbing sight: because I had stayed at Jenise’s after celebrating her birthday with Cary Grant movies and some wine — and then a little Hennessey. Yum! Of course it was more relaxing to know I didn’t have to drive home that night and her guest room…
Category: inspiration
Fancy Meeting You
Yesterday on my morning walk I ran into this snapper at the edge of Buckingham Lake. It may be a bit difficult to gauge size, so I should mention her shell was about a foot long. Clearly not in a hurry: on my first lap around the lake, she had just got out of the…
Happy Birthday, Joan Jett
Yes, LOL — thin on content yet again: tenure package is coming together, but I forgot that the reassigned time and professional grant requests are due Friday and must be signed by my department chair and dean before being submitted. Soon, soon, I will be able to breathe again. Two other non-fiction projects due this…
Self-Reliance
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his…
Friday’s Forgotten Books: Shrieks at Midnight
Shrieks at Midnight: Macabre Poems, Eerie and HumorousSelected by Sara and John E. BrewtonDrawings by Ellen Raskin Here is my Rosetta Stone. Its garish orange cover depicts a ghoulishly grinning dinner party with a horse and skeleton at the feast. The feast? Human flesh. An angular woman with a tabby perched on her shoulder sends…
Red Nose Net
Comic Relief is a big deal in Britain — all sorts of people take part in Red Nose Day and the best comedians get together to put on silly skits and, best of all, it raises oodles of money for charity. Some Americans (like John Hodgman and Jonathan Coulton) are getting together to get the…
Phoning
Why does telephoning make me nervous? Always has. I’ve been putting off a phone call that I was actually looking forward to having — it’s just that the idea of it made me nauseous, so I delayed, wrote more questions and thought, “maybe tomorrow.” But I did it! At last I did. I’m sure he…
Figuring things out
I’ve been skimming through Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. In the midst of the chapter “The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2” suddenly so much seems plain, particularly when I look at the way people behave in academia. Despite all my years spent in that realm, I retain an uneasy feeling of having one foot in and one…
Marvelous
I glory at the wonder of the internet. I know it is fashionable to pooh-pooh its success, how it’s turned us into a world of loafers who would rather interact virtually than actually. I know the tendency is there — I Twittered about not being able to find my favorite sweater, so I know the…