new movie: Dart monkey vs. Z.O.M.G. btd5

sundays, it usually comes down to a lot of homework, piles of grading i brought home on friday 'cause i got to doing something else at the office. it's drizzling and cold here; everyone is off somewhere watching the super bowl, and i'm home with two very bored kids who are beginning to bounce off the wall, though occasionally they mumble at me about calling their friends who are invariably not home or busy. it's true, i don't have much for them to do, and in fact i'd rather they leave me alone and let me get to my homework, but i should be so lucky. the movie was an aside, disrupted my homework a little, took the computer down 'til it was close to zero, but it didn't matter, because as long as the boys are up, i get very little done. this includes, what's on computer, and what's not. different folks are skyping from different directions. the little guy, he skypes whoever he sees, so there's a kind of running conversation with the entire extended family. we all know what's going on with everyone.

the skype doesn't always work perfectly though, so we occasionally get cut off in the middle of a conversation, and this could be because of disrupted connection, or just about anything. it's maddening. but it's free. in the old days you'd pay a small fortune just to hear a voice.

with the poetry reading now put off a week (see below) i have a little more time to prepare the book and get ready; there are a lot of publicity angles to explore and arms to twist. i'm taking both a personal and public approach to publicity. personal, in that i'll twist the arms of all my friends, virtually all of them. public, in that we're also hitting all the local media, from here to there, to get whatever turnout we can. in the meantime i'm meeting the people at the good samaritan and hearing whatever everyone has to say about it. seemed, at first, to be a worthy cause. maybe there are more worthy ones. 2013 standndeliver might have a different plot line. if there is one.

i'm exhausted on weekends; i get up saturday morning, make a cup of coffee, make another one, finally get dressed, and go run around taking the boys hither and yon. by evening i'm exhausted and i haven't even done anything. takes a whole day to unwind out of my teaching schedule. sundays i try to hold it together at quaker meeting and then have to turnaround, get ready for monday. it's a grind. i'm barely prepared to start. some people talk about going back to work in order to rest. for me, there is no rest. neither one is all that relaxing. rest occasionally happens when i exercise, or swim, or walk from the car to the office where these days i get to see a construction zone. it's rest, when they are operating the heavy machinery, and i am just walking. it's rest when i take the elevator.

the other day i got into the elevator though, and, as usual it doesn't light up, it's impossible to tell from its light whether it will actually stop at three, whether it sensed your urgent push to go to three. ok, that's ok, i'm quite used to that, it's like a deaf old grandfather who, you yell at him, and he mostly hears you because it's the same thing you yell every time and he's quite used to it. i'm used to this, this elevator whose light is broken, and i settle in for my burnt-to-the-gills restful ride, but this woman who's also in the elevator, she's not used to it, and somehow concludes that the elevator is off to a ride into who-knows-where, which makes me feel like maybe she regards me as the wrong person to be stuck in an elevator with. no, she's just plain panicking, the light's not on, who knows where it's going? i spend a few minutes trapped in a claustrophobic box with the panic of being on the edge, and not knowing one floor from no floor.

the exercise bike is restful, and that's because it's entirely zydeco, accordion music and french-creole yelling in harmony, all in a rhythm that is more or less adjusted to the bike itself. i don't know if all those cajun singers were exercise-bicyclists but it sure seems like that kind of sweating and that kind of blues are close kin and in fact actually spare me from being down there say, in the summer, when you really sweat. i knew this guy, a fiddler, who went down there, learned french, came back with all these awesome fiddle tunes, and made it, in his own way, and i think about that sometimes, but mostly i think about other stuff. it's about the only time i rest.

monday rolls around, and once again i'm way behind on everything. way behind on the moodle, where i'm supposed to show everyone my grades. way behind on various aspects of my job which i will frantically try to catch up on this week. there's no way to finish it all. i sometimes talk to people, which is nice, but which costs me. late at night, i feel guilty, there's too much, and i'm too pitifully behind. you'd think these small towns would be restful. well, the traffic is, but everything else, it's worse than ever. more later. chao