I didn't think that November could get any worse as a total experience, but I've never been unemployed this time of year. Monotonous, grey, damp, lifeless - I'm starting to miss the creaky fluorescents & windowless charm of my classroom. At least you knew it was going to be deadly when you walked in the door. There were no environmental surprises, except for students occasionally lighting garbage cans on fire down the hall.

I think the sun came out for five minutes today. A record.

I'm trying to find solace in this hideous weather, but I can't dredge up a thing. Poor Sprout, to be born in such a month. I try to find the beauty in this time, other than the vigorous life in my body, and, well... that's pretty much where it begins & ends.

I found a lost entry - apparently I wrote out a day in longhand back in October and then completely forgot about it. So October 24 - Lamb Circus is now here for your perusal. It tells the story of the morning I went on my first field trip - but ends before I lose patience with a passing motorist and flip the bird in front of cheering students.

"He would remember for the rest of his life a peaceful half-hour spent reading a copy of Betty and Veronica that he had found in a service station rest room: lying down with it under a fir tree, in a sun-slanting forest outside of Medford, Oregon, wholly absorbed into that primary-coloured world of bad gags, heavy ink lines, Shakespearean farce, and the deep, almost Oriental mystery of the two big-toothed, wasp-waisted goddess girls, light and dark, entangled forever in the enmity of their friendship. The pain of his loss...was always with him in those days, a cold smooth ball lodged in his chest, just behind his sternum. For that half-hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs, reading Betty and Veronica, the icy ball had melted away without him even noticing. That was magic...the genuine magic of art. It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world - the reality - that had swallowed up his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain so universally despised."

- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (576)

I finished this book yesterday. If you're a comic geek with literary pretensions and you have yet to pick it up, don't wait. Very good stuff.

Booty Call: Day 256 - Toenails reach tips of toes; limbs are held flexed. I had a possibly-maybe sign of labour this afternoon, but in the absence of any other signs, I think it was just indigestion.