I’m finally acknowledging this morning that the holidays are over, that there are two weeks left before classes start, and that if I’m going to get anything done, now’s the moment. I’m hoping to return to some regular writing here in this new year, and so am going to begin with a few relatively random bullets, just trying to capture some of what I’ve been pondering.

snow
Originally uploaded by KF

• The big-ass storm that pounded the west coast seems finally to have passed. The radar pictures I watched much of the weekend were quite dramatic — rain, at one point last night, stretching solidly from Palm Springs to the east to the coast, and from southern Orange County to well north of San Luis Obispo. Storms of that size are like a homecoming of a sort — one of a few things that I really miss from Louisiana — but they’re unusual enough to be a bit of a pain here: flooded streets, crap drivers, and a general creeping damp cold that my heating system can’t seem to overcome. On the upside, however, is that the storm has left us with enough snow that the desperation of this year’s drought might be a bit ameliorated.
• The first episode of season 5 of The Wire already has me hooked, but that was pretty much a foregone conclusion: combine my absolute adoration for the show’s narrative strategies, its complex web of characters, and its focus on the systemic obstacles to really fixing serious social problems with the fact that, this year, the media provides the primary system in question, and I’m one hundred and four percent sold.
• I’m back to work on some MediaCommons projects, which I hope I’ll have more to show for, soon.
• I’m also attempting to move forward with my own writing projects, but as usual, they’re getting short shrift. I keep saying that I want to find ways to integrate that writing with posting here, and I keep not following through. I’m determined to get some blog mileage out of the research I’m doing right now, though, and some project mileage out of the blog, too. I’d call it a new year’s resolution if I really believed in those.

More from the homefront, soon.

With one exception, every single Christmas card I have received so far this year has been produced by Shutterfly.

… since R. took off for the holidays:

1. Some percentage of my not-blogging is directly attributable to his presence here in Claremont. Which is to say not that he’s interfering with the writing process, but that some percentage (that same percentage) of my blogging was fueled by a general need for communication. And with him in the house, there’s always somebody to talk to. Hence, a much lowered need to talk to the internet.

2. I develop very bad habits when he’s away — or re-develop, as the case may be. I indulge all of my worst impulses, just out of a need to make myself feel better. Also because I can. Not that he’d fuss at me if he were here, but I’d feel like he ought to fuss at me, and so wouldn’t indulge in the same way if he were around.

These two things together might seem to suggest some sense in which blogging is a bad habit, which I don’t at all believe. But it is a habit that I associate with my living-alone-dom, rather than my life with him. And so if I’m going to re-cultivate that habit, without re-cultivating the actual bad habits (of which the less said the better, I think), I need to figure out — for the umpteenth time — some new mode or means of writing here, that can keep me going.

Every semester has an emblematic moment. This semester’s finally arrived today, in the moment when, walking along talking with the dean, I stumbled on a bit of uneven sidewalk and completely face-planted on the pavement.

Falling gets harder every year after 30, I think; one has both come to assume one’s verticality to be stable, given, and lost some degree of the flexibility that makes sudden changes negotiable. Actually, I think both states might be summed up in the term “dignity,” and boy, is mine bruised.

I keep reliving the moment, and its aftermath: turning to look in the direction the dean had just pointed, turning back to ask a question, feeling my toe hit the obstruction, and that clear interval in which I knew I was going down, but had not yet hit. And then: lying on my back on the sidewalk, saying “oh, shit” and trying to start breathing again; seeing the dean’s quite evident shock and concern as he asked whether I had hit my head; attempting to reassure the two students who stopped to see if we needed help and offered to call security. Then limping off to the meeting I’d been heading toward.

I’m banged up, though nothing is more bruised than my pride, I think, with the exception of the notebook I was carrying and the sunglasses I was wearing, each of which has a pretty good case of road rash. I don’t want to make too much of this, but it’s awfully hard not to feel like there’s something allegorical in this moment.

For the last three days, as I’ve faced my computer in my office, I’ve heard this insistent tapping at the windows in front of me; dozens of hornets buzzed outside, looking for ways in. A couple each day succeeded, sending me in search of campus maintenance, as I’m fairly seriously allergic to all sorts of flying, stinging insects. But even when they were safely outside, something about that tap tap tap, just barely above the level of my hearing, really had me on edge — a much too literal manifestation, I think, of the swarming demands currently begging for my attention.

Is another three hours in the day, only available for reading and writing. No meetings, no meals, no phone calls, no email. Preferably — and this will no doubt make me sound like even more of a misanthrope than I actually am — no human contact at all. Three hours in which one is somehow protected from everything else, closed into one’s monastery cell (though a comfy cell, with a good reading chair) with only books and the writing apparatus of one’s choice.

Of course, if I’m being honest, what I really need is the focus to be able to use such a magically protected three hours wisely. Off to go make the best of the 28 minutes I do have…

Seriously: forget April.

September hereabouts brings together the end of summer (as in the always-insane beginning of the fall semester, in which the red [i.e., meetings] takes over my iCal) with the onset of the worst of summer (as in temperatures verging on 110 degrees). Fortunately, the heat wave of the first week of classes didn’t last long, and things are actually quite nice now, weather-wise. But I am just barely hanging on in terms of keeping up with the deadlines that are coming fast and furious, keeping my classes up to speed, keeping a handle on my physical well-being. Already, two weeks into the semester, I’m waking up exhausted every single morning.

I should know by now that this is just the way things are, that the semester always starts more painfully than I expect, but somehow I keep thinking to myself that this year will be different, that I’ll be better organized, that I’ll be able to keep up with the projects I started over the summer, that — imagine this — I’ll still have thoughts interesting enough to bother with blogging. Needless to say, that hasn’t happened this year, but I’m trying to remain positive: perhaps the second half of September will be better, once the end of summer is really met by the onset of fall.

I just got an email message from MoveOn.org, with the subject line “Vigil to End the War in Claremont,” and for a few seconds longer than I’d like to admit, I was mightily confused. We have a movie theater now, and several new restaurants, but those were all the developments of which I was aware.

A nine-hour time zone change in one direction, followed two days later by a three-hour change back the other direction.

One apparently lost, and then merely destroyed suitcase. One two-and-a-half-hour airport delay.

Two days, fourteen interviews. Nine more tomorrow.

Ass? Kicked, thanks.

Have not posted in part because I don’t want my very own blog to confront me with the knowledge that it’s no longer July. But must suck it up: August is both going to blow, and to blow by…