Three months later.

Hello, old friend.

I have eight minutes until the bell rings, to update you on where I've been for three months. That's not enough time, but here are two anecdotes that will explain, if you read carefully. Of course you don't read carefully. You're a blog.

1) Yesterday, when I was grading papers with my thin, red Papermate correction marker, I noticed that I'd gotten sloppy and sleepy: my hand stopped doing what I wanted, and as I wrote comments I kept missing the paper and accidentally writing on my own fingers and hand. By the time I was done grading, the little red-pen dashes looked like self-inflicted bleeding cuts. In fact, I convinced myself that they were cuts enough that when I looked down I felt little slices of pain, just a little warm and fresh, not yet ready to heal.

2) I hate my graduate research right now. It's a load, and I keep having the instinct to tell my Composition students that they're my little mousy subjects, that I'm photocopying their papers in secret and their conversations in public, that I'm writing journals about them when they don't know what I'm doing up there at my desk. I imagine myself in a lab coat at the photocopier, that the green light from the machine is really some radioactive light, and I carry their papers around like Erlenmeyer flasks. They are white mice. I wonder how attached mice-testing scientists get to their mice before they inject cancer or whatever underneath their fur. I mean, I'm just observing their behavior, so I'm not that equivalent. But at the same time, I want to give them new names. I mean, I have Test Subject #1, but I feel like they should have mouse names like "whitey" or "bitey" or "Circle-face" for the one that won't stop running in circles and hitting his mouse muzzle on the side of the maze.