here before the flood i pause again to think about what is done and what needs doing.

we're just about at the end of third quarter. how does this happen? how do we find ourselves three-quarters done? a mere three months from summer again. tonight abc news told us about time travel. the message from albert einstein and others is that the faster you travel the slower time goes. but this contradicts our felt sense that the busier we are the quicker the calendar turns. the busy-ness of a school year involves getting out of bed one day at a time, putting one foot in front of the other, finishing a day or a week one by one and before we know it here's summer. in short, the faster i travel, the faster time goes. i know that the physicists are talking about intensely fast travel over unimaginably large distances (at 99.9% of the speed of light my six year journey is actually more than 400, 000 years at home), but you'd still expect even the tiniest little payback for all of the speedy living we do. no. time-perception is not time-passage. i guess. here on the ground, waiting for godot.

i had a good day in school today. the sophomores began their short story panel presentations, and they were mostly very solid - sometimes even creative and funny. the juniors and i stumbled happily onto D. H. Lawrence's "The Rocking Horse Winner" (o yes we're already in the twentieth century, having slipped past the victorians with a wink and a nod). for the first time, i assigned students to read the character dialogue in the story as if it were a play. and it worked very well they seemed to feel, thus redeeming one day out of five (it had not been a good week with the Virginia Woolf and the Joseph Conrad). this class had also just dumped their final research papers into my eager hands. then the seniors surprised me with some insightful interwoven readings of passages from our three recent plays. and in my last period sophomore honors class, we began to bid farewell to Spoon River by creating the First Annual Spoon River Awards ceremony, the Spoonies. you can observe the voting action at A Plain Public Road.

somewhere in the course of the day i managed to fire off several notes to our fearless department chair who asked for feedback on the new literature texts for grades 9, 10 and 11. i hate these books. hate. hate. hate. and (though he asked) i fear that i told him so. i hate these books - and they are the best of their kind, as far as i've seen. but they are too big (approaching five pounds), too expensive (round about 60 bucks). high-gloss candy bars. high percentage of calories from fat (every new edition sees more pictures and busy graphic devices. more cluttery supplementaries, backgrounds and questions - less actual literature). despite all of this, we will order them because we have to have something and we are too tired and pressed for time to figure an alternative. i ended one of my notes with "Don't, Jake. It's Chinatown." a mysterious mess not completely of our own making.

i've received some interesting feedback on the previous entry. all week i have been intending to write to allie, but...time time time, slippery frog, leaps away. allie's fiery response suggests the level of honest heat this issue provokes. another correspondent referred me to andrew sullivan's coherent and persuasive critique of the RCC's position on homosexuality just as i was busily re-reading sections of his Virtually Normal. anyone with a serious interest in the subject should read this book. that is, if you can find the time. check out this, too.

We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass.

Karl Marx