January 22

Good news, everyone.  According to Omega by Camille Flammarion (a nineteenth-century astronomer), the world is not destroyed by a comet in the 25th century, despite the lengthy speeches of French scientists.

Instead–spoiler alert–the earth dies of old age many hundreds of centuries from now.  The oceans gradually level the land, and the land gradually absorbs the oceans, until there are only two people left on a waterless planet: Omegar and Eva, the final members of a species that perfected itself in just enough time to watch the decline of its physical world.  Happily, they die in each other’s arms and their souls are escorted to Jupiter, where, we assume, they live a bodiless life with other like beings.

And the earth dies and the sun dies and are absorbed into a new sun which creates a new earth.  The new civilizations on the new earth have no memory of their ancestors, of course, but that is as it should be.   And all of these ages are but a single point in the span of eternity.

Deep.

At least I can rest in Flammarion’s reassurance that in the future, while never, of course, reaching the intellectual capacity of man, woman nevertheless expands her mind to encompass the sciences without losing either her beauty or her delicate sensiblities.

April 18

Three years ago, I bought twelve extra spoons because I was tired of always running out of them.  Since then, to justify my action to the teasing of my friends and family, I have always striven to make the additional spoons feel useful.  Here’s a chronicle of my spoon usage today.

Spoon #1.  I made my first cup of tea and oatmeal with the same spoon.

Spoon #2.  I needed a fresh spoon for my second and, later, third cups of tea throughout the morning.

Spoon #3.  For lunch, I had tomato soup, which one usually eats with a spoon.

Spoons #4-5.  In the afternoon, I made peanut butter cookies, an activity that required one spoon for getting the peanut butter out of the jar and a second, smaller one for scooping the dough out to roll into balls.

Spoon #6.  I stirred a quart of instant lemonade.

Spoon #7.  Having misplaced Spoon #2, I needed a fresh spoon for my fourth cup of tea.

So there, you mockers.  Tell me that my foresight of three years ago was not justified.  I even cleaned them all up after myself.

April 9

1.  Grading.  I have a modest stack of exams to grade.  I’ll be watching a movie this morning, perhaps a cartoon, or something that I’ve already seen several times, and whittling away at the stack.

2.  Award Ceremony.  Later this afternoon, I have to attend an award ceremony during which I will receive an award.  Unhappily, I will have to completely reformat my curriculum vita to fit even one more line under “Awards, Conferences, and Publications.”  Yes, I know I split an infinitive just there.  This is a blog, all right, so stop being so judgmental.

3. Prom.  My husband is the chaperone for this year’s prom at the school where he works.  He invited me to go with him.  So for the first time in my life, I’m going to prom.  And who with?  My husband.

April 2

1.  The Old Man Is Snoring.  It’s a positively solid wall of water outside, and while the raindrops make a pleasant white noise on the roof, it’s so gloomy and dreary that I’m more likely to fall into a trance than mere sleep.  I never expected Texas to be so very wet.

2.  Ben Fountain.  I’ve just finished reading Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, and I am delighted to say that I now have a little literary crush on the character from the first story, John Blair.  Each of the eight stories was masterfully crafted–pardon me while I swallow my envy.  Happily, I will be meeting Ben Fountain later this month (he will be visiting my university) for a reading and a Q&A, during which I am guaranteed to be too awed to ask a question.

3.  Performance Anxiety.  Speaking of which, I’ll be giving a reading myself this evening with two of my fellow graduate students at a local venue as part of a graduate creative writing reading series.  I am perfectly petrified and very much regretting the peer pressure I succumbed to when I signed up.  I’m reading one of my older stories, one of the more polished ones, and I’m terrified that it will be too boring.  Some of the other stories have been funny, and mine… isn’t.  Oh well.  It’ll all be over tomorrow.

4.  April Fool’s.  For the first time in a long time, I neither played a joke nor was joked upon.  What kind of world is this when National Lie to Your Friends Day goes uncelebrated?

March 27

1. Small World.  Today I traveled via hot air balloon to Victoria Island, where I drank hot tea and ate scones with Jane Austen.  After we decided to co-write First Impressions, we took a turn through the Butchart Gardens, and I left her writing in a gazebo.  I zipped over to Chicago in enough time to commission the new exhibit I donated to the Field Museum–twin woolly mammoths that have been in my family for years.  I wrapped up the evening over dinner with friends on the stage of the Paris Opera House.  I had pasta and chocolate cheesecake.  It was lovely.

2.  Talents.  Also I read five-thousand-pages’ worth of all the books that I’ve been meaning to read for ages.  I’ve also become fluent in several languages overnight.  Scientists are giving me lots of money to figure out how I did it.  But it’s a secret.  If you want anything translated into Basque or Tagalog, let me know.And I finally wrote The Novel that I’ve been thinking about for a year.  It’s been bought by a certain publisher for a several million dollar advance.  I’m working on the sequel.  It’ll be done tomorrow.

3.  Oh, Ferret.  Lastly, I taught Anastasia to leap through flaming circles and dance on her hind legs.  She will pick the pockets of all the spectators and we will run away into the sunset.  She will be going into business under the name of The Wallet Thief Extraordinaire.

March 21

1.  Chipotle.  We eat at Chipotle every Sunday.  Most of the staff recognizes us and knows our orders.  I always get a salad with rice, black beans, chicken, corn salsa, sour cream, cheese, and dressing.  Today, however, I left off the sour cream for an experiment, since the spoon with which they scoop it doles out far too much.  The salad did not taste measurably worse without the sour cream, and this time I didn’t have to abandon the last third of the bowl as lost at sea.  I might, after almost two years of clockwork regularity, permanently omit the sour cream from my Sunday lunch.  If anyone ever says humans are not creatures of habit, reader, you may point to me.

2.  Snow.  Church was cancelled due to the snow.  On the second day of spring, there’s a light dusting of white on the ground and a very bitter wind whistling–genuinely whistling–between the buildings of our apartment complex.  It’s about thirty-five degrees outside, with a forecast of seventy on Tuesday.  I bought rain boots for the first time in my life, and a calf-length wool coat.  I’m no ally of global warming (or even global climate change), but I will observe that there has been of late some unusual weather.

3.  Dubliners by James Joyce.  Last year during Spring Break–in fact, on St. Patrick’s Day–I finished reading Dubliners for the first time; and a calendar year later, I am reading the same book.  It is assigned for my modern British fiction class, a point which my husband finds truly ironic, since Irish nationalism was what drove a large part of Joyce’s writing.  Joyce would have hated being classed as British.  Nevertheless, I am enjoying the reread, which, as every good book ought to be, is complex enough to reward a second or third or tenth time through.  Perhaps my professor has inadvertently helped me start a Read Irish in March tradition.  What other Irish authors should I keep an eye out for?

Dear Graduate School

Dear Graduate School,

I’m afraid that you have been spending too much time perpetuating your own myth.  You laboriously teach me to write pseudo-critical essays rapidly, and then you give me a timed test in which I must write not one but two pseudo-critical essays as a sign that I am a successful graduate student.  But under what circumstances other than graduate school would I ever need to write eleven pages of air in three and a half hours?  (In any case, speed is a preposterous component of composition.)  Nevertheless, I thank you for validating my growing suspicion that my writing skills are becoming honed for nothing more than bowing to your conventions.

Sincerely,

A Casualty of the Cause