Stirring the Life-Roads With Hand and Foot

Halloween and Houses and Hentai

I've been telling myself that if I hadn't had an egg thrown at me by Halloween, I'd made a good move to Digital Harbor.

Er.

I shall declare that the splattered egg (and paintball shot?) I found on my windows this morning don't count, in that they weren't targeted at *me*, but only at the school as a whole -- my windows are by far the  easiest to target from outside, while remaining at an escapable distance.

So I win!

I was also able to dispel bump-and-grinding from the school's Halloween Dance with a raised eyebrow and a step forward, which means I'm respected by students who don't kow me (I didn't have to lift a brow to any of *my* students). See the section on the anime club below for more of me imposing my will to limit others' recreation.

I've been giving out Granola Bars to trick-or-treaters. We had stockpiled several weeks' worth, and those reserves are nearly depleted -- I hadn't expected any, yet they are here -- and they travel in packs. Half of them (or more) aren't dressed up at all ("I'm dressed as a student") and greedily, overwhelmingly mob the door, cruising for free food. Maybe next year I'll hand out masks instead of food to those outside the sprit of the event.

***

Liz and Nat are going out with a friend of Liz and her date, bar-hopping in costume, and I'm not. I really wouldn't mind going out to a bar and drinking a bit one of these days, for the socialization and the people-meeting and the music, but whenever Liz and Nat start talking about doing so, and I suggest that I come along, they either try to dissuade me ('you don't like beer', 'everyone will be drinking. You won't have fun'), comment that they wish I could drive because I wouldn't be getting very drunk and they by preference would, and/or they eventually decide not to go.

So this time (in the somewhat pointed absence of a "would you like to come?") I'm sitting out, not trying to add myself to their fun, so they can go and get drunk without worrying about poor widdle David who doesn't drink so much, and who probably wouldn't have a fun time anyway, and would make everybody else have less fun therefore.

Gr.

I need to talk with them about this.

***

Liz and Nat (especially Liz) are house-hunting, and have, it seems, found a gem. They and their unfathomable money are going to Buy a House, at age 23. It's a block east of here, underpriced at $150,000 and large enough for a spacious two, and not three. This is expected, and we've talked about it -- Liz/they want(s) to live alone, and maybe slough this long-haired hanger-on.

I like my house, and I don't like moving. I haven't lived for more than one year in any one house since I was five frickin' years old -- swapping back and forth every two or three weeks, never putting my clothes in a dresser because they'd be out and packed again in less than two washes. Harkness was the closest I came, three sets of nine months, with three different rooms and 50 new housemates every year. For all that I enjoy change and edge-life, I want a Home for more than a while at a time.

*And* my bed had to come in through the window. I'm not in a hurry to reverse the process.

So move to Baltimore, and be my housemate! I can't quite afford $1400 a month by myself. You can even have two rooms, or there can be two of you. I think Jo and Nathan would be an especially good couple to live with, or Erik could quit grad school and drag Annie across the continent to dwell by the water in America's Greatest City.

With me.

I don't want to live with strangers, and I don't want to live alone.

Nor do I want angst, but there it is. Do blogs generate angst, magnify it?
Or am I simply channeling extant grumbles hence?

***

There is a German tallship (KMS Strøjsensomething) in the harbor. White and lofty and grand, she catches the sunrise nicely.

***

Regarding the nascent anime club:
My assistant principal, in approving the club, also (rightly) come to me with concern that some things under the anime umbrella are rather inappropriate for a school-sponsored club, sex and violence style. I've been aware of this, and will need to be careful when approving films for viewing. Although I'm probably more familiar with the land beneath the parasol than most (all?) of the rest of the faculty, I can count the titles I've seen without using my toes. This prompts me to solicit reccomendations of tamer titles from you, Reader. Totoro pops to mind, and Howl's Moving Castle... and?

Is violence more okay than sex?
Are guns and flaming death worse than swords and torture?
Are people allowed to be naked?
How naked are people allowed to be?
Can you curse in subtitles?

Uch. Most of those will have to be answered conservatively, which means that guns are okay and human bodies aren't.

Mr. Adamson is the moral compass for the geeks of tomorrow.

Maybe I'll just stick with My Neighbor Totoro.

Posted by: anhaga at October 31, 2005 20:44 | link | comments (1)
film, friends, school

Just Me and the Bellydancers

I went to the Rennaisance Festival yesterday, the last day of the season, and so did three Imperial Stormtroopers. That genre-jam aside, it was a fairly typical Renfest, with comic swordshows and honey merchants and fiddles and bagpipes.

...and bagpipes.

I was not in the company of folks in a dancing mood, and so I danced alone to the bagpipes and fiddles and drums, next to a handful of amateur bellydancers. I regret that the bellydancers were so much into their own thing that I did truly dance alone, despite my best attempts at inclusion, but I am none the less glad that I danced.

I wish Rafe had been there.
I've never known him to turn down a dance. It's been months since last I hopped and twirled like a fool without care, and it is a splendid thing to do. Just my body and the music, and the occasional glance shared with band and the crowd.

More.

I want to get that feeling back, and not alone. To embrace wild and forgotten things, to be alive outside of school. My current work-model leaves me three or four "free" hours at home (although duties as anime club sponsor may change that, if they ever get that application off the ground), I'm not coming home dead this year, and I ought to use that time more effectively than blogging and reading the whole of that time away.

There's an aikido dojo somewhere near here and Digital, which would not so much serve the "wild" part, but would definitely take care of the "forgotten", "body", and "not alone" aspects, and may provide a leg up into getting to know people who aren't schoolteachers. And somewhere in Baltimore, there's contra dancing.

!

Posted by: anhaga at October 24, 2005 20:16 | link | comments
friends, feet

Archival Woof

This is the first(?) sideways poem, written in thanks to those who attended a celebration of passage for me -- to my discredit, I don't remember quite when it was -- it seems farther away than college graduation, yet almost certainly post-dates high school's end. The only really awkward part is the bottom-right, second line up, with regard to the vertical reading. It works in bits and pieces, if you let the eye wander. You can stretch meaning around the column if you put some effort to it, but it shouldn't be that hard. This was an early attempt*- I'm still happy with it, and with the classic David-style wolf (and the pup, not my ususal drawing-type, never the less a good puppy). A nice bit of me, to share as a gift with those who gave me honor.




*The ducks-and-color poem flows better, especially if you're familiar with Apple's Spinning Wheel of Rainbow Death, and even better if you were sitting where I sat, seeing the wheelchaired man and his granddaughter playing by the colorful kayaks (docked) while ducks and taxi'd tourists took turns upon the water. I really do like that most recent poem, even if it's so context-laden that it probably doesn't make sense to anybody but me.

Woof!

Posted by: anhaga at October 21, 2005 20:52 | link | comments (1)
poetry, friends, family

By the Way

Went to a conference.
Won a router.
Now I must teach it.

I've been asked by students to sponsor an anime club -- neat!

I like light rain.

It's getting cold. Warm socks and thick blankets, hooray!

Orson Scott Card needs to buy better fiction for his magazine.

Corn pudding (Monday) didn't turn out fantastic -- rice cakes vs. saltine crackers. Fresh from the oven, it was a little bland and disintegratey. However - its leftovers (Friday) were just as good as any historical corn pudding leftovers (which is a good thing).

I want my dad to send me cookies.

I want occs to have better cookies.

OSI = Aliens Probably Stole The Ninja Dew Pop.

Posted by: anhaga at October 21, 2005 20:22 | link | comments (2)
food, school, electricity

Sideways

Ducks quack	while I type
on granite steps	I make my plans
while grandchildren play	on gears and wheels
and tourists fill a steel-gray sea	with color.

I wrote this just before the surprise-attack rainstorm, yesterday. (To clarify: while sitting and working by the harbor, wind blew day-old rain off high awnings, outboard windowshades for a trendy renovated wharf-house office-building, and onto Hrothgar of the previous post)

This is a style of poem I quite like -- it may be read sidewards or downwards, as one poem or as two. Although it's written for reading straight down or entirely across, you may also let your eye wander, make new combinations, down-down right-right-down, as many ways as you like, and some of them make a sort of sense.

The style evolved from fiddling with the whitespace between half-lines of a conventional left-to-right-then-down poem (I borrow the strong half-line break from Anglo-Saxon poetry), and noticing that a few lines worked both ways. I'll try to find a copy of that first one -- it was about wolves, and elders, a thank-you note for a David-celebration.

Here's another, from my college Honors Project (in Computer Science), on the subject of "Genetic Programming" (or developing 'computer programs' by 'breeding' a set of initially random programs):

Given a problem:
We might sit down	or we can make
and seek an intuition,	a few stabs in the dark,
fail, and eventually	cast some sparks
cobble together a solution	in the sea of possibility,
	and let the sparks breed

This has the additional neatness of being offset by one line in either column, and was originally written as two vertical columns, instead of a "normal" straight-across poem (which is how these things usually start for me).

I need to name this style. "Sideways" poems are what I call them in my head, although that might be a bit misleading, as they're not *just* sideways. A "two-way" poem imples invertibility, backwardsness, and these aren't that, either. Rotationally homomorphic? Twisty-Bendy? "Adamson Style"?*

Anyhoo, I like it, because it usually happens by accident. A few polishes occur after I notice the sideways potential, but the second reading is largely unconciously emergent.

*"Adamson Style" is the trendy new (somewhat bouncy**) way to walk, at Digital Harbor High School. For some reason, it's most popular while my back is turned.

**the fact that my class website is http://adamson.bounceme.net/ does not help matters.

Posted by: anhaga at October 16, 2005 19:27 | link | comments
poetry, electricity

From My Cold Dead Fingers

My Pismo, my vintage 2000 Powerbook, sleek and black, worn smooth with age.
Trusted companion, loyal servant, beloved plastic pal.

It remains, through five years, five homes, four operating systems, two states, and now a guerilla rainstorm.

Like a fall of frogs, the water came out of a clear sky as I worked by the wharf, lasting a hand of seconds. The keyboard was spattered thoroughly before I closed the lid, moving out of the water's path. I quickly saved my work ("Plans.txt" became "3-0U-3" to the suprised keyboard) and I shut down.

Inspection revealed no water within the system, blessedly well-designed. The keyboard serves me without flaw as I type this (For lo! The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog), and the world is at peace again.

I dread the eventual failure of this Pismo (named Hrothgar, and sometimes Scyld) -- the external power cable is fiddly at its joint, and that replacement part (the famed Yo-Yo) costs dearly, for its size. Yet as a whole, as a machine, its awesomeness continues unabated. I dwell upon swapping in a faster-spinning brain and claiming Scef's son as my main machine, letting Prometheus rot -- but I shall not, if he can be repaired. Having two machines is day-to-day convenient, and (as evidence suggests) incredibly useful in the face of a breakdown.

I hope to keep Hrothgar by my side for years to come, regardless the fate of my little silver door-prize.

23 screws, indeed.
Why in heaven's name do you need to disconnect the power button to replace the hard drive?

Pfah.

*AND* I had to pry 4 keys off, to *UNSCREW* the damned thing's keyboard! Those were the INSTRUCTIONS!

...hardly worth what I paid for it. Modern technology.

Humbug!

Posted by: anhaga at October 15, 2005 17:19 | link | comments
electricity

On the virtues of delegation

Damn, and double-damn.

Today I set about to replace my ailing (12" aluminum) powerbook's hard drive. Fantastic. I did the same a year ago when my  first (and current, for foreshadowing's sake) laptop's drive failed. 20 screws later, I came to the instruction:

Carefully disconnect the microphone and power cables, being sure not to pull on the wires.

And I did NOT pull on the wires to such a thorough degree that the entire power-cable connector, soldered onto the motherboard, came free with said cable. The cable remains firmly attached to the connector, despite subsequent prising. Research reveals that I am not the first to liberate the connector from the board inadvertently. The observations thereat soothe my displeasure, that the soldering wasn't that good a job in the first place, and his cable was also firmly jammed into the connector.

At this stage, I decided not to pursue the remainder of the procedure, and re-screwed my laptop, which will not now respond to its power-button, and its disk remains unreplaced and therefore the thing is unbootable anyways.

The same fella reports that a local repair shop was able to reconnect the power cable with a makeshift connector. I hope for the same. So I've put calls in to MacMedics and the Little Shop of Hardware, hoping that the latter (more local) establishment will be able to re-solder a suitable connector onto the board. Otherwise, I'll ship or lug my 'book down south-aways to MacMedics, who are certainly certified in such a repair.

I should have listened to the drive vendor's advice (and Nat's) and delegated the surgery in the first place, and swallowed the overhead of message-passing in favor of robustness and encapsulation. But I had good reason to think I could have succeeded, and if I had ever soldered anything in my life (and had soldering equipment), I might try to finish what I began. Lucky for me that I don't, or I'd likely screw things up even further.

***

On the flip side, it's a beautiful day, and a marathon went by my house this morning, and the scent of bread floats through my window on fall-crisp air.

And I'll always have my Pismo.

Posted by: anhaga at October 15, 2005 13:10 | link | comments (1)
electricity

Let's start at the end, and work backwards:
Tomorrow's pedagogical gambit: The Journey of Edward Mail, a hapless email message's descent through the seven (or four, or Tannenbaum prefers five) layers of a network stack and out into the World Beyond. I've written the first half, and the kids have to match up the parts of the story to each layer (easy), and write the second part (the ascension) themselves (less easy). This is day 3 of the OSI model, and some of them have seen it before. Will it be too youngish in theme (which is why I added the blood), or is my style too thick and roundabout for my audience? (I made an effort to write simply, but I know that I can get carried away).

I'm suddenly reminded of Dante, which I wasn't thinking of originally. Did the inferno's protagonist rise back through the circles on his way out? Did he escape? I've only seen the thing as a mud-pit play, and there the descent turned out to have been a dream. Whether or not the lesson meets with success, I might rework it with some allusions (nothing too heavy), and hopefully smoother writing - this was an inspired whim, but I dashed it off quicker than I'd like. It can be improved.

***

An English teacher (the same from an earlier blog-post) has a bloodied cardboard arm nailed above her door. Grendel wæs gegrippaþ on earm ond eaxle, and such. We had a Technology department meeting last Friday in that room, with the totally badass former principal (who Gets Things Done and Takes No Bull and Is Loved By Everyone, perhaps a Hrothgar in his younger years, who gets out of town before the Bureaucrat Monsters come to ruin his hand-built Digital Mead-Hall), and it was a pleasant bit of gore to catch my eye.

Posted by: anhaga at October 12, 2005 19:58 | link | comments (2)
school, vikings

Corn Pudding, and Winners

We have a winner!

The person visiting through the starband.net connection (which is a satellite internet service, and therefore probably my sister on her farm) correctly guessed the two-line riddle, simple in its word-play. The answer is "water", from this context easily river or flood style (as probably-my-sister guessed). I was leaning more towards rain, but that was the mysterious second verse I couldn't word correctly:

I am hundreds, and I am one
tum-te-tum-tum tum-te, hon.

It did't feel right, so I went for a more general water-riddle, leaving interpretation up to the reader.

This person, who is likely the Phoenix of former riddle-lore, has won the right to not be eaten by a slimy proto-hobbit, and also some corn pudding, following our grandmothers recipe (eggses and crackerses, my love), should she somehow stop by my home in the next week. If she shows up after that, I'll have to make it again, and that will require more foreknowledge (an hour's worth) than her visits usually entail.

The corn pudding is an old Thanksgiving tradition, which has continued under my urging and my father's baking for years unbroken. This year will be the first Thanksgiving without my grandmother, and quite likely not at my grandmother's farmhouse. I suppose I'm feeling the press to get my foot in the tradition door, to do my part to keep things going, as a measure against their too-soon dissociation.

For your curiosity and cookery,


For OSCA-folk who may look this way, I tried a variation on this recipe, on a co-op scale, in my junior year. It came out far too oily., very wet (yet tasty, in an eggy-milky-greasy sort of way. It wasn't what it was supposed to be, which is a corny eggy casserole with quiche-like consistency). I think I used a great deal of dried bread bits, not crumbled enough, and quite likely I used too much oil. Use butter instead of oil, if available, and prefer many shallow dishes over one big deep one. More than 3 or 4 inches of pudding-goo is asking for an uneven bake.

If you can make it vegan, on a co-op scale or not, you'll have amazed me. I'm certain it's possible, but I never dared to try.
This means you, Jo and Nathan and Phoenix.

There's two dozen cookies and a backrub in it for you if you do.

...
The pudding is in the oven.

Dinner will be it and green beans, with something carbohydratey on the side (mashed potatoes! I may have no choice, for theme's sake), with maybe some sister-made tofu on the side, if the eggs and the milk don't speak enough protein for my taste.

I'm cooking and eating alone tonight, the Liz and Nat contingent having gone to see King Lear with the Nat-family group.
Slight envy, as I haven't seen much theater lately, but also contentment to cook and work by myself, for myself, without wanting to accomodate group food-preferences or schedules or inclinations. David and his corn pudding, followed by a thick paperback on the couch, in the still of the evening. I've still got an hour's work for tomorrow, and I've got plenty of time to see it done, so I'll use my quiet house nicely.

Some of my best meals have been when I've done things special for just me.
Reference the great plum-sauce over tuna, the honey-ginger mashed potatos, the ever-more-clever roux, and the pound cake I ate mostly by myself, with enhanced icing. I think this night will stand similarly in the gastric annals of your humble Wanderer.

Oft him ge-cookan,
are gebideth,
metudes milkse...
longe scolde
hreran mid hondum
eggalice sæ...
Food be ful ared.

Posted by: anhaga at October 09, 2005 18:20 | link | comments (1)
poetry, food, family, vikings

Wet

Dripping, driving, deep and dancing
Pouring puddles, pools for playing
Soggy splashing, storm suggesting
that I might like
to take a walk
in the rain.

Posted by: anhaga at October 08, 2005 15:29 | link | comments
poetry, feet

Riddle

A riddle struck me this morning, and a power-outage prevented its posting.
This is more in the style of Riddles in the Dark, versus the Exeter Book,
and should be simpler to solve.

I come running, where men must tread.
I bear new life, and carry the dead.

It really does need a second verse, but I can't think of anything to match it,
and I'll age it to a more suitable tongue when I get home
(today was a half-day for students, the rest of the day is "professional development").

For instance, "beran" (to bear) has several related forms, and I think I'll replace "carry" with one of them, for alliteration. "bury" feels right, but is somewhat misleading, so I left it as carry.* The second half of the first line suggests a construction that means "in such a place that", but I can't remember it offhand, nor am I sure what I must do with "must," which has a very Anglo-Saxonish feel already, but I can't recall ever seeing it in Old use.

The riddle-guesser will recieve a 3-point bonus on today's exam, and will not be gobbled by a spooky lake-monster.
Double points (and leftover morsels) will be awarded to the creator of an appropriate second verse.

*on last spring break's Ozark-hike, there was a great debate over the origin of the word "curry", in the culinary and functional senses. It was posited that they shared roots with "carry" and "courier", by way of the spice trade, or possibly early takeout restaurants. This was later dismissed as ridiculous, and we arrived at consensus around the idea that Marie Curie's researches(and subsequent world travels)  into radioactivity led to several developments in the safe transport of dangerous materials, spicy foods, and (of course) computer science.

Posted by: anhaga at October 07, 2005 12:09 | link | comments (1)
poetry, food, friends, vikings

Story Time

Once upon a time in College, Erik and I organized a weekly gathering, a fireside reading-aloud of childrens' stories, called "Story Time." It warms me to know that Story Time has enjoyed a resurgence of late, as evidenced by Nathan's recent email (forwarded to me by Nat):

It is right.

Carry on, O Story Timers!

Posted by: anhaga at October 01, 2005 11:31 | link | comments
friends, poetry

The Universe and Funnel Cake

Serenity.

The movie made from the ashes of the short-lived "Firefly" space-western TV show. A solid hoot, a rip-roaring rocket ride through space. I wonder how it was received by folks who hadn't seen the show -- there was a fair bit of exposition, explicit and interwoven, but many of the jokes and character-relationships in the movie made sense to me because of the story developed through its one fractional season.

I don't worry about that, because it was a fun story, with great (but not flashy) visuals, solid acting (mostly), and a suitably twangy soundtrack.

I only have one complaint, and that's the size of the universe.



Space is big.

It should take a long time to get from one planetary body to another, even within a star system. In "Firefly", the implication was that of a far-flung human empire, Foundation-style. I wasn't bothered by the fact that there didn't appear to be any way to beat the speed of light, because the series gave a nice sense of the *time* it took to travel between worlds, of the patient emptiness of Space. Travel took weeks instead of years (Alpha Centauri is our nearest star at 4 light-years, I don't know if that's a typical distance), but it was enough to make the universe feel Big.

In Serenity, the tacked-on exposition suggests that the whole of humanity (post-Earth) dwelt in a single densely-planeted-and-mooned star-system. I could have ignored that, being awkwardly pasted into the opening scene. However, travel between the key worlds in the movie's story took "a day or two", even though some of these worlds were most unusual and hidden, and intended to be in far, out-of-the-way reaches of space. A ghost planet, a world bristling with warships, or one behind a sparkly blue ion cloud. Things that couldn't be conveniently close to other more mundane ports of call without being noticed. Every world was a stone's throw from the next, and to include all the worlds and oddities of Firefly's universe in the few dozen worlds of The Human Star System would have left very little space (haha) for anything else.

I could get started on the zone of earth-style habitability around a hospitable star, and how crowded *that* would become, or about the galactic implications of regional names like "the core" and "the outer rim", but both of those are better discussed by Isaac Asimov. Watching Firefly, I could and did imagine its story living within Asimov's Foundation universe, with dense and affluent planets near the galactic core and poorer, frontier-like settlements scattered out along the milky arms of our cozy disk of stars. I enjoy that association, and it's harder to maintain in movie-land.

So I'll insert some "time slowly passes" scenes into my mental record of Serenity, and change the days back into their proper weeks, inside my head. The power of belief will sustain me, and I'll make it through all right.

***

Today is the Fell's Point Fun Festival, an autumnal neighborhood-party, with street vendors and food and music and Carnival Rides, right around the corner. It takes up the better part of 8 blocks, by my morning run's reckoning. I shall eat a funnel cake today.

I love it when The People block major car-ways to make room for community merrymaking. It's satisfying. I kick myself for missing an even greater event in that thread, wherein they CLOSE THE HIGHWAY SO PEOPLE CAN PLAY ON IT.

I missed it, the annual opportunity to walk and dance and bike and blade upon I-83, all the way from downtown to the beltway, the span between last year's home and this one. Had I been aware and ready, I would have biked north to my old favorite ice-cream shop, hung about my old haunts, tooled around on the open road with my fellow pedestrians (and pedalestrians?), and ridden myself home without hindrance of traffic, between two points that (by non-highway geography) would have been practically unbikeable.

Next Year.

Anyhoo, the time is NOW for funnel cake and necktie vendors, and for Ferris wheels and bands on plywood stages!

(next weekend, NOW will be for a return trip to the Renaissance Festival, to catch a Green Man blessing and a continued breath of harvest-celebration)

Posted by: anhaga at October 01, 2005 09:48 | link | comments
film, food, friends, feet

Chasing, and Running Away

New air
singing cold
on lungs and legs and wings

Racing the day
to the sunlit lands
across the water's veil

Watching
from a golden hill
as they chase a leather sun

Guided home in fading dusk
by wheels of light
til morn.

It's been a fine first week of fall.
I really don't mind these 12-hour days,
as I don't rush my grading and planning, and I tend to take an hour's break in the 9th or 10th hour to watch my boys and girls run about and play, and 15 minutes of bicycle bookend the span.

Best yet, at this time of year, I'm greeting and parting with the sun.

****
Yesterday, my old high school (Southwestern, home of the Egg Incident, the π-Day Whipped Cream Incident, and several remarkable students) played my new High School (Digital Harbor, home of Whiteboards and the After-School Nachos for Sale, and also several remarkable students) in varsity football.

I began on the Digital side (our home field doesn't have stands, just a football field in the middle of a larger field, by the river by the highway), and cheered and hollered and learned a few new things about football. All the time, I was trying to spot any familiar body-shapes of my old Southwestern students, for I do miss them, and still feel like a dog for leaving them.

In time, I got up the nerve to walk around the field to the Southwestern side, to see who I could see. Three of mine were on the team, and one in the small visiting audience. All were quiet when I greeted them, not (perhaps) knowing what to make of me, the traitor. I had decent relationships with some of these students, although they constantly tried and tested me, beyond where I could maintain focus. And I left. I ran away to Digital, and I don't know how much that hits them.

They said little. One of them (with whom my relationship was not the best) simply took me in, glowered, and put his helmet on and returned his attention to the game. I felt awkward, and so did they.

So I left Southwestern's side and returned to Digital, and Digital scored a touchdown and took the game, and I rode home, past my safe little school to my cozy little home, away from the kids who needed more strength than I could give them.

That school will sort itself out. It's already a better place than it was in its first rough year, starting to build its identity and its rhythms. Once enough of the faculty sticks and stays, it will begin to build some continuity, and draw strength from its roots.

Being able to get myself to and from work (and not having to rely upon another's pickup, or a persistently inconsistent bus) is important, and I couldn't have done that at Southwestern. And a dozen other reasons why it was good for me to leave.

One day, I'll make amends for that.

Posted by: anhaga at October 01, 2005 09:37 | link | comments
poetry, school, feet