Puppies Who Labor Under the Misapprehension That They're Birds

Oh, hello again. You almost forgot I lived here, right? Me too. In fact, I'm so turned around these days I barely know where I am . . . but life is not so bad. After all, I managed to survive last week, which featured 28 half-hour conferences with students from my creative writing and composition classes. (There would have been more conferences, but a good number of them missed their appointments and rescheduled for this week. Which bodes well for this week!)

The weekend did feature a particularly frightening episode, however, in which our 6 month-old lab jumped out of my husband's moving pick up truck (for the record, he was in the cab, in the middle seat -- because our 9 year old lab was hogging up the window -- and his flight through the window was sudden and unexpected and physically difficult and still unexplained . . .  I mean, he comes running back into the house if he so much as sees his own shadow outside, so I don't know why he'd try to chase an animal when he was in a moving vehicle). 

He wasn't run over, but he landed very hard and very fast on the asphalt road. So far, he's okay. We're watching him closely to make sure he doesn't just fall over suddenly or spontaneously combust, but after being freaked out and also sedated by the vet for the remainder of Saturday, he's back to terrorizing us with his destructive acts of chewing on Christmas ornaments, stuffed animals, the older dog, and the 4 year old boy. Relatively normal stuff.

I cannot wait for this semester to end. I can't wait to get back to things like reading or writing. I have at least two new books of poetry to read (James Arthur's Charms Against Lightning -- I need to read it thoroughly and not piece-meal like I did before he came to visit the school, and Stephanos Papadopoulos' The Black Sea, both of which were released in November) and a collection of short stories, Ron Savage's Loving You the Way I Do (I read his short story "Mr. Kobayashi" in Epiphany two? years ago and fell in love with it. I've been looking forward to this collection coming out for a long, long time and Black Lawrence Press has taken their sweet-ass time in publishing it.) I want to get back to the verse play monologue project, which ended about mid-November when everything in my life seemed to go completely pear-shaped. I'm looking forward to the next semester in a way that most people regard the new year: a chance for a fresh start.

I owe a lot of good friends emails and phone calls and would like to start being social once again, too. Aside from Thursday night, where I'll attend a reading featuring past winners of the Lexi Rudnitsky prizes -- and get to reconnect briefly with one of them, Cynthia Marie Hoffman -- I don't see much social-ness coming my way. Just conferences and grading from here until December 20. Every day at the office last week was like running a marathon . . . a steady pace, but continued, unrelentless "tasking" from the moment I arrived on campus until the moment I left it.

This week will probably be much of the same, so please forgive more silence on my part (not that I have readers waiting in rabid anticipation for my posts -- this blog is, after all, more for my sanity than anything else -- but I'm conscious that there might be one or two of you out there who follow it much like one might follow a soap opera -- What kind of bizarre shit will this stupid chick do next? -- although that might be giving me too much credit. I really don't think my frantic, anxiety-ridden posts hold quite as much entertainment or suspense as, say, General Hospital might.)

Wow. Once again I win the award for Most Unnecessary Use of Parentheticals. I'm a writer, ya'll! And a teacher! My students are so, so lucky, aren't they?

I shall leave you, for the week, with this: (One of my favorites)