Headed to Florida on Thursday morning.

1. Backbend (wheel) with feet at the wall into a backbend with feet on the wall into handstand into a walkover. It feels good to have a super challenging Sunday yoga class.

2. Still playing around with some off-body moves with two hoops. Coordination with on-body moves comes a lot easier.

3. Nearly finished with my paper on Nightwood. I didn't really have time to do anything especially ambitious. I wonder if I could do a critical independent study in the winter or spring quarter? It's interesting how an image search for "Nightwood" doesn't immediately give me any results that have anything to do with Djuna Barnes' novel.

4. In the last movement for theater class of the quarter, I sprained my toe, but I also stood on someone's shoulders and tossed a ball back and forth between my hands. It was kind of amazing when I finally relaxed and settled into the posture--my bones were perfectly lined up above the person basing me.

5. Dear professors: please tell your TAs about your plans for grading at the end of the quarter early so that they can schedule their travel plans accordingly. Dear TAs, ask the professor you are working with about this at the beginning of the quarter so that you don't accidentally make plans that mess with the professor's plans.

Now that I'm beginning something new, it might as well be over.

1. Not bored with Language Poetry. Not bored with John Cage, either.
2. I haven't even started classes at UCSD yet, and I already have to look for funding for next year from a grant database made for PhD students, not MFAs. Oh well. If I don't get funding for next year, I just won't go back.
3. Been grading all. Day. Long. That's why I couldn't meet with you at 4pm.
4. Convinced that real estate limits mobility. Unless one is rich or bought one's real estate in the 70s, 80s or before.
5. Missing good bookstores.

Sorry, still alienated

And, like most of the people I've communicated with recently, overburdened with work. In my case though, the work isn't so bad, but there's a lot of it: 5 hours a day of teaching + several design contracts + MFA statement of interest. The design projects are fun, and I'll actually been playing with creating some nifty typeface effects, which means that the end result of both projects will, I hope, be some of the best work I've done yet.

I'll post my statement of interest after I send it off tomorrow. Only a deadline will prevent me from noodling with it further.

xo

More more mysteries.

I am still grading. Still and always. Until May, when I will only be partially employed for a few weeks.

In between teaching and grading and grading again, I did something that looked kind of like this:


Except not quite. I can hold my toes, but I can't put my forehead on my foot. And my hips aren't nearly as square or as rooted. Rajakapotasana is a wacky pose, and it seems completely astounding to find my toe, there. It doesn't ever seem like it could possibly be my toe. But I am glad it is my toe and not someone else's, which would be even weirder.

Many people, including Mark, are at the &Now Festival, just up the road from us.

Ba ba etc

Last night I dreamed that I'd actually taken that job. I woke up in a sweat and had thrown all the blankets and pillows off the bed. That job haunts me every few months. I make plenty of money, but I'm not making $60,000 a year. Thinking about that salary really does make me want to throw up, for several reasons 1) $60K is a lot of money, I think 2) I'd really, really have hated the job, which would have involved me managing a combined design and writing department and encouraging them to work really hard and really fast so that the people upstairs could make even more money, and 3) It's hard for me to imagine a world in which I could make $60K doing something that wouldn't make me want to vomit. I don't mean getting 60K doing something that would make me happy, I really do mean something that wouldn't make me want to vomit.

Honestly though, at times I wish that I did have a tolerance for office work. It would make things easier. But nope. I prefer having a crazy, precarious schedule. Because with that crazy, precarious, and totally unsupervised, uncubicalized schedule and income, I can still:

be an artist, pay my bills, save a little, sometimes do some traveling (more of that in the future, after said bills are paid), practice yoga, bike along a lagoon each day that has several excellent birdwatching spots, walk two blocks to the beach, go to readings (not as often as I'd like, but more than I thought I'd be able to around here), publish chapbooks, write, drink wine, go out to dinner sometimes, get Lester new toys every few months...

Touchy

No trip to the desert this weekend--in San Diego county where the weather is supposedly so great, the weather is often not great. 40 mile an hour winds are no good for desert hikes. Plus, Ilya Kaminsky is on the front cover of the San Diego Reader. My hamstring attachment hurts. I'd like to separate my femur from my hip joint and just get it over with.

I posted new poems. Still in the draft stage. And these actually are spaced differently--but HTML doesn't render space well...

We did not discuss "May gray"--I didn't want to upset them too much.

Today the weather is more like what people imagine when they imagine San Diego weather. "Gloomy" was a vocabulary word today, so I taught my students about "June gloom."

Still reading Hannah Weiner and loving Code Poems.

My sister Sarah sent me a card from Adelaide with a lovely picture of a rainbow lorikeet on the front--and also one on the inside that she'd drawn. She inquired about Lester and asked if I ever "try to draw the birds I see." She signed the card "All the dearest colors of the rainbow, love, Sarah."

Altered States

One of my coworkers at one of my many jobs asked me for advice about sensory deprivation tanks--did I know of any? Apparently the only one this person had found is in at Full Circle Yoga Institute in San Diego. My coworker knows I practice yoga, and that's why this person asked me--if one yoga center has a sensory deprivation tank, why not another? I had trouble focusing on the question, because the moment this person said "sensory deprivation," I thought of a scene in "Altered States" where the main character Edward Jessup has regressed so far back into collective consciousness that he's become a kind of Neanderthal who goes on a killing rampage at the zoo. Later he says something like this to his wife: "Last night I hunted, killed, and ate a goat. It was one of the most sublime experiences of my life."

road rode wrode

It is difficult to learn English in English class if you are never in English class. I don't care how much money your parents foolishly paid for you to come here.

However, today was a good day. I rode my bike to work this morning for the first time in weeks. I saw a red-tailed hawk in one of the acacia trees near our apartment, and three herons, and two feral parrots. I rarely see feral parrots around here, so I was very excited. They were smallish, green, and loud. Some kind of conure, probably.

I also now have my California drivers license. At last.

Lester's been in a pissy mood because he's going through his spring molt. Today I gave him a shower/steam bath, which helps take care of the pinfeathers, and he's in a noticeably better mood now.

It's not my assignment

Oh, I wish my sinuses would just explode--that would feel nice(r).

I would never design an assignment that requires developmental English students to write a cause-effect essay on global warming. It is a boring, uncreative assignment, and someone plagiarizes every time. It's bad for the student, obviously, and it's an administrative nuisance. I tell students, "it's easier for you to write a solid essay than it is for you to plagiarize and not have me notice." They do not listen. If someone plagiarizes so well that I can't tell they are actually plagiarizing, then on some level I don't care, because it means that they must have pretty good writing skills.

Probably I am supposed to model qualities of "excellence" and "leadership."

I typed up a poem. I wish html rendered spacing better.

I'm grading. Oops, I mean I'm "providing feedback." I keep forgetting that I'm not actually a professor or a teacher, I'm a "facilitator."

The student who has missed four out of the past ten classes told the evaluators that my class moves too quickly, and the student who dropped down from the advanced class and never does the extra assignments I give him (and which he requests) said that the class moves too slow.

I bought my brother a gift membership to the Audubon Society. I can write that here since I know he doesn't read this blog.

I'm going to make tea.

All Problems at All Jobs All Together

And all must be solved, even though all are a waste of time.

I've been writing poems, which must mean that I am a poet.

I feel like reading the Plays of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim. That can't be good.

Are we enjoying our task

For the most part, we are.

And I typed up and revised the first part of a new manuscript I'm working on this afternoon. That felt good.

And I felt nearly normal during yoga class this evening. Even during inversions.

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Etc.

Continuous sore throat and messed-up sinuses. Lots and lots of ginger lemon tea.

A mostly good ESL class, which is good.

More flexible and complicated offers from yesterday's interview-a six-month contract? A three-day work week? I'm asking for details, details.

Numerous design and typesetting deadlines today. Some mine, mostly other people's.

Jerome Rothenberg and Steve Willard at UCSD this afternoon. Will Mark and I get out of our offices in time? What interesting/strange/shocking/boring problem will prevent us (or, hopefully, only nearly prevent us) from going?

Showers. Rain. Inevitable accidents. Rainy rides in the, er, rain.

Everything at once!

I started teaching another ESL class today--they're more advanced beginner level. I haven't taught a lower-level class in a while, so I was nervous. But I'm glad to have this class. They are friendly and motivated. They know they need to work on their skills, they're not yet resentful of the fact that they have to work on their skills. Plus, my tendency to pantomime and use really exaggerated body language to explain vocabulary is actually necessary and even appreciated.

Today the wireless router got all weird. All the security settings that Bill Howe helped me set up and which I actually managed to maintain went away, and the network defaulted back to being called "Linksys" and having no security settings. I can't access the router IP to change the settings. I reset the router and somehow changed the network name and made a WPA Key--but I did that all through the software interface program thing on my computer, not by going in and changing the settings manually. I still can't access the settings manually. In theory, when I reset the router, the password should have defaulted to "admin," but it didn't. And the old password I used doesn't work. And now that the network has a new name, I have no idea how to change things manually. But it is encrypted, and working. I guess that's good, but I am uneasy.

Today I decided that I have to turn down an almost formal (they want to check my references) full-time job offer with a salary that is kind of shocking (in a good way). I felt a little sick about it all riding home, but I just can't do it: I make a living, pay my bills, eliminate debt, save, and travel with my freelance work and teaching. I'm not getting rich, but I don't feel insane about my work, and I have a flexibility that could never be matched with a full-time job. I can go to yoga in the middle of the morning or afternoon. I'd have to use all my vacation time to visit my family or travel for poetry and art things, and I don't really want to have to do that. I don't want to have to explain to my boss why it is essential that I leave work at 3:00 pm so that I can make it to a 4:30 reading. I want to work like crazy, but work the late hours at home, with Mark around and Lester on my lap and jazz music playing. And mostly what I want is to have work interfere as little as possible with writing and art. So, no to the full-time job.

I did have a very nice bike ride cursing down Palomar Airport road and along the 101 though, just before sunset. (And riding down Palomar Airport road after dark would be nearly suicidal, especially where it crosses the 5). It was one of those "oh, it is very beautiful here" moments. It isn't always beautiful here, but it was this afternoon.

My North County

is nice in the winter. I am glad that I do not have to take all the asthma and allergy medication I used to have to take (ooo, a many modaled sentence).

The interview went quite well. It looks like I'll get to work on a small initial project, and then we'll see how it goes. The people at the firm are from New York. In a professional context, I do find it much easier to communicate with people from back east. I appreciate the directness.

Cross your fingers for me.

I have a meeting tomorrow for a possible design freelance job.

I am thinking more than usual about what to wear to this meeting.

And, of course, I'm biking to the meeting, so that makes it even more challenging.

Over half the students in one of my online classes received Fs

because they just didn't do the work. This is normal, more or less, for online classes, but it is depressing. I'm done with the heavy grading for a few weeks now, until the next session starts up after New Years.

It's a survey!

Should I send a manuscript to Litmus Press? I'm skeptical, but someone I like and respect told me at a party that I should.

I slept a lot this weekend. Until 9:30 on both days, which may not sound like much but at this point in my life is significant sleeping in. I was exhausted after this past week.

I made broccoli in a new way. I roasted it. It was good.

I connected the external hard drive and put some things on it.

I'm going to do a few projects for International Arrivals in the new year--probably designing a journal and some file folders. Yay! I want more jobs like this.

I am either high spirited or fried

But I'm ready. For. The. Semester. To. Be. Over.

I know that we need rain here in San Diego, but I hope that it doesn't rain on Friday. I want to go hear/see Nathaniel Mackey read at UCSD. I've never actually heard him before, and it's not as if San Diego is so bursting with readings that I wish to miss one.