My Morning Reading, and The Beginning of a New (Half-of-a) Semester

I sat down to write and started reading instead, which is okay, I suppose: (I half-heartedly forgive myself for trolling the internet because I found these:)

1. The Journey by Yvor Winters.
2. This interview with Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco. (Can I just say how disappointed I am in both asshole journalists and even fellow poets in their reaction to Blanco's poem? Writing occasional poetry is wretched work, and Blanco made good work of a wretched assignment.)

Last week brought three rejections, two of my manuscript, and one from a literary journal. Two rejections even arrived on one day! (Good day.) I think I need to steel myself for this -- all the stuff I sent out in the fall is going to come rushing back now as magazines begin their prep for spring issues, and those book contests have to choose winners. It would be nice to receive a little bit of good news, though.

The new semester begins today. I have office hours before teaching my first class at 12:30 p.m., and I'll probably spend them in a fit of email-answering and desk-cleaning. I still haven't recovered fully from last semester's chaos, or the bronchitis that followed the flu, so between ill-organization and ill-health I'm off to a good start! Things aren't that bad, though -- I'm not teaching anything new (two Introduction to Literature classes, one Standard Freshman Composition, and one Creative Writing), and because we had such a short winter break I don't really feel like I've been out of the loop for that long, so returning to teaching feels less momentous and foreboding than it does in the fall.

Of course, my feelings about returning to teaching might be somewhat affected by the fact that I'll only be teaching for half of the semester, as I'm due to give birth to Vampire Baby sometime in mid-March. If everything goes according to plan (i.e. I don't go into labor early), my last day of class will be March 8.

I do, however, think it may be time to start keeping lists again. My mushy pregnancy brain, which will convert to mushy mom brain after the baby's born, is already struggling to retain all of the information I feed it . . . and writing things down in lists ("gentle reminders," one might call them) will hopefully keep me on-task and out of trouble.

It snowed on Long Island last night -- our first real snow of the season. It's not deep enough to really confuse or delight the new puppy, though, although part of his ambivalence regarding snow might be due to the fact that he's still reveling -- reveling -- over the removal of his cone, the satellite dish that kept him from pulling out stitches after he was fixed last week. We're all happier about the absence of the cone, actually. The backs of my calves will be less bruised from now on, certainly, and the children won't feel compelled to jump out of the way when he comes running toward them.