one of the best things about having an ipod and itunes is that i get to be in on the shared itunes library here at work. i don't know if any of that is the proper terminology--all i know is that i've been listening to elvis presley and johnny cash all morning from somebody else's music library.

katie and i have been having some great conversations lately. we've started hanging around some fun and wholesome guys from beebe, ar, about 10 minutes away. katie met one of them at work and arranged a playdate for all of us about a month ago, and now i usually see at least one or two of them every day. even austin likes them, and he doesn't like anybody. (note: he likes me.) the other night, we were sitting at wafflehouse waiting for some of our beebe friends to get there, and we were talking about life and the possibility of death.

i am continually amazed at how much goes on inside the human mind. one never, ever knows what is happening in the lives of the people surrounding him. last night, i went to an explosions in the sky concert with beth, zach, katie, daniel, and austin. the crowd was so tightly packed that i had a difficult time seeing the stage even in the ridiculous heels that went with my costume. explosions in the sky is purely instrumental, so the time everybody in the crowd would normally spend mouthing all of the lyrics was spent with general contemplation, rhythmic swaying, and slow, affirming nods. i passed the time by silently judging indie rock uniforms and and wondering what sort of lives those people had.

the concert was the finale of our venture brothers halloween party. the venture brothers is an adult swim cartoon that austin and i watched on dvd together a few months back. i haven't polled anybody, but i'd say it's pretty popular with people in my age group and a few years older. my friends and i dressed up as venture brothers characters, and austin and i had the good fortune of being the monarch and dr. girlfriend. the monarch is the arch nemesis of the main character, dr. venture, but he's meant to be pathetic, a grown man in a butterfly outfit. his girlfriend is aptly named dr. girlfriend, and she is feminine, but the character is voiced by a husky man. all in all, it was an amazing couples costume. a couple of strangers asked us to pose for pictures, which we did. it felt good to look ridiculous with austin in public, one of those relationship-building exercises in shared nerdiness.

here they are:



here we are:

in light of harding's decision to keep me on for another semester to fill their (only!) open classes, i have had to decide on a textbook, a grammar/mechanics companion, and two extended works.

this has all happened in the past two or three days, which is exciting because i haven't even had teacher evaluations yet. now i don't have to worry about my students getting me fired, which means i can finally return to physically striking them. tardy? thwack! forgot to single-space your header? pow! gave me a funny look? smack!

just kidding. that's no way to keep a job.

by far the most exciting part of teaching literature is being able to pick out exactly which novel i want my class to read. however, this has shifted from exciting to terrifying to frustrating. all of my favorite books are inappropriate in one way or another.

lolita = sexual predators; underage sex; extramarital sex; incest
slaughterhouse-five = too many swears
breakfast of champions = too many swears; dirty pictures
east of eden = 600 pages
of mice and men = should have been read in high school
the perks of being a wallflower = sex, drugs, and homosexuality
in our time = really just a collection of short stories
letters to the earth = disjointed essay collection
any poetry = off limits

the final candidates were the razor's edge by w. somerset maugham and the heart of the matter by graham greene.

both novels have distinctly religious themes and elements, and both deal with disillusionment.

i decided on the maugham novel, partly because i've finally learned how to pronounce "maugham" with confidence. greene deals so heavily with catholicism and the problems of catholic guilt, and harding students react surprisingly cynically to catholicism. this reaction is due to misunderstandings of catholic doctrine, but i think the the heart of the matter would only contribute to those misunderstandings. also, let's face it--suicide is a downer.

the suicide in the razor's edge isn't as much of a downer, so it wins. stylistically, maugham is less accessible, and i hope this will make the book more interesting, more unique, and more difficult in a good way.

the other book that i'm thrusting upon them is the little prince by antoine de saint-exupery. i believe that every human being should read this book, and it will balance out the razor's edge in both length and readability.

am i talking shop too much?

katie and i have been doing one of those cute roommates things--we're reading a book aloud together. i'd been wanting to revisit catherine, called birdy for a while now, and i really thought she would appreciate the spunk of the main character, a knight's daughter from 1290. the entire book is written as a journal, which inspires me in a small way to continue writing here. sometimes i genuinely forget that it is a work of fiction, which makes me happy and sad--happy that the bad things that happen to her didn't happen in reality, but sad that i don't have verifiable data that a girl like her existed in 1290.

sometimes my reactions to literature worry me.

Recent Trends:

My Living Situation ( ↑ ) Much happier

Cold Showers ( ↓ ) Every single morning =(

Townies ( ↑ ) Friends without a curfew

My car ( ↓ ) AC making a clicking sound; might explode?

Across the Universe (→) Horrifically gimmicky, but visually outstanding

Short hair (→) Cute, but grows out quickly

Kolumbus Convention ( ↑ ) Comparative physical beauty; discussing gameplay

Chicken salad ( ↓ ) Disgusting

Cats (→) Cuddle, but produce vomit

Employment ( ↑ ) Harding asked me to teach next semester.

Dressing as an adult ( ↑ ) Slowly phasing out t-shirts

Using my degree ( ↑ ) I don't know how this happened, but I love it.

Heels ( ↓ ) Blisters on my toes

Grading ( ↓ ) Blisters on my fingers

Sports analogies (→) Understanding them more, but I still can't use
them without sounding irretrievably awkward.

Steak (→) The arrow is misleading, but my affection for
steak could not possibly increase.

The Office ( ↓ ) Why is the new season so bad?

William Carlos
Williams ( ↑ ) The stain of love is upon the world.

Joseph Conrad ( ↑ ) The horror, the horror!

Postmodernist
Literary Criticism (→) Can it be read for pleasure?

Thanksgiving (→) Visiting family, but grading persuasive essays

Austin ( ↑ ) Nine months on Saturday

Rainy days;
Mondays ( ↓ ) Always get me down

the first time i talked to dr. fowler, the head of the department at uca, he told me that there was an assistantship opening (full tuition and a $7k stipend). after a short conversation about my resume and life plans, he encouraged me to apply.

a day or two later, after i'd already spent $140 of my parents' money on registering for the GRE, i received an e-mail from dr. fowler. apparently, he had been mistaken. there was not going to be an opening.

i suppose it's really all the same, considering that i got an angsty leading-of-the-holy-spirit feeling when i visited the campus. the commute and the campus just didn't feel right, which is a real shame, considering what a lovely town conway, ar, truly is.

so, i got an acceptance letter from the university of central arkansas, and i didn't feel anything but vague regret that i had applied and paid the application fee. i'm still planning on attending graduate school eventually, though, and i can see myself pursuing teaching writing (and literature?) as a career.

the profession continues to knock me around, though i do enjoy it. i know that i'm probably too sensitive to be a teacher, though i'm probably too sensitive for most jobs. (are there professional emoters? can i pine vocationally?)

more than anything, i still want to write. the fall literary festival is next week, and i'll be reading a bit of poetry as a representative of scribblers, the creative writing club on campus. i still do write once in a while, but it's mostly unearthing drafts from previous years and revising them.

all of my poems seem to be about god. however i begin to write, i end with god.

i've been wondering lately whether god is even knowable. i've been to a great many churches in the past several years, and most of the time i just occupy space on a pew, wondering whether or not there is some cosmic understanding that everybody in the church but me has attained. the people around me seem to be intensely emotionally and psychologically involved in what happens during the service. it's like a joke that i'm not in on. i'm just there sitting in a folding chair in the family life center and wondering why the other people my age around me are exchanging knowing glances about how faithful and powerful and magnificent is the love of god.

faithful love flowing down from the thorn-covered crown makes me whole, saves my soul, washes whiter than snow... does it really? have these people singing been made whole by the love of god? what exactly am i missing?

i'm in the library right now returning a kurt vonnegut book (i read the first half and didn't open it again) and looking for something new to check out. on the way here, i was walking about fifteen feet behind a student when he stopped dead on the sidewalk, looking back at the sky behind me. i turned around to see it for myself.

the trees on campus were negative space against a genuinely brilliant pink sky.

"oh, wow," he said.

"oh my goodness," i said.

is that what it means to know god?