busy and fairly productive days in school - if student activity and discussion and writing and message board posting are any measure. i'm reminded again that i have no life beyond this work. i am a secondary school english teaching machine - of a certain make, not the latest model, lacking some more recent bells and whistles but still functional enough. no life but this one from bell to bell, then home to crash and plot the next day's coordinates.

don't mistake my tone here. i love this stuff, no drudgery here - not yet, anyway. I love getting up knowing that i'll be reading and thinking about shakespeare, pope, swift, and dickinson all day. i love these later days of the quarter when i get to meet with the apes one-on-one to review the quarter's reading (had the first of those today). i got to introduce sophomores to walt whitman - such gorgeous fireworks followed - they don't all love him, but they do all know him now. juniors are wrestling with the delicate indelicacies of swiftian satire - and writing their own. and we've got just a week to go.

but i dearly love friday night right here - home with the cat. i can type this nonsense, think about listening to some tunes (more chopin? monteverdi? dock boggs?), consider what the television might offer (not much). i can breathe and imagine how late and long i can sleep on saturday morning (eyes wide open at 7:00, no doubt). i can read a book. i can process student papers. i can think about christmas, read some good poems, and ignore this impulse to write a bad one.

Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.

William Burroughs