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february 16, 2001.I am red-hot right now, pedagogically speaking. I've just spent the last 20 minutes brainstorming wonderful activities for my upcoming poetry unit, using bits & scraps from the newspapers and half-remembered university courses. All the tea I drank this morning must've raised my I.Q. or something. I don't know where it comes from; all I know is that I'm so brilliant right now that I almost hesitate to turn my brain to more mundane purposes. But. I know that if I don't write now, I'll go to bed without an entry. Listen to the sacrifices, folks. It's all for you.
It's finally Reading Week. Good lord. I'm going to spend the entire time catching up on work and cleaning my house, and no, I'm not ashamed of it either. I think I'm past the life stage where I consider it a mortal sin to spend vacation time in useful endeavour. Or maybe it's just that I couldn't get one of the mythical $77 flights to Toronto for the week and I'm trying to stay up on my high horse. Either way I want to clear a wide range of things from my plate this week, from the posters that keep falling off the wall to the projects due with machine-gun regularity after the break. Who knows? I may even pencil in some time for lounging around with the books I got for Christmas. The week is my oyster, to coin a phrase.
My morning class was an interesting grab-bag today. We convened in a house used to support the international students who come to Acadia, which meant that we were more-or-less free to wander into the kitchen for more tea and cookies at any point in the lesson. I had a bad moment right at the very beginning when my emotions were teetering back over last week's precipice...but when I sadly went off to make myself a cup, I settled down almost immediately. I expect far too many social things to come out of that class, and when they don't materialize right away, I get cranky. I had yet to realize that the best moments come when you aren't expecting them. Awe-inspiring moments such as my professor's story about doing research on Wordsworth in Oxford and getting handed one of the books he owned when a more recent edition wasn't to be found on the shelves. Funny moments like being in a lesson on air and saying that my favourite motion was Brownian motion, only to have the Anti-Stephen say quietly, "I always try to move like that." And then starting to wiggle in his chair. Personal moments such as nobody getting the joke when I made a parachute out of a napkin and decorated it with a stick figure waving a cowboy hat as he rode an atomic bomb over the logo 'HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE PARACHUTE.' I was a very happy girl at the end of the three hours.
I picked this book off my shelf today, perhaps because I have been thinking of Poet so much lately. (Ogden Nash is one of his favourite poets.) Maybe using this poem is an apology to him for yesterday's entry. Or maybe it just seems appropriate to keep the sticky-sweet Valentine's Day theme going after yesterday's late song list. To My Valentine |
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