|
Busy busy busy. You
busy, too? Yeah, I figured you were. Why does it get like this?
Is there some God of Stress over yonder who gets his jollies
by watching us all crack up in this 57 car collision we call
End of Semester? I guess so...either that or just poor planning
on our part. Let's not even talk about Christmas shopping. In
fact, I've been so busy that I didn't even realize that yesterday
was Emily Dickinson's birthday despite the fact that every message
on the Dickinson list serve mentioned it. They were all talking
about December 10. I said to myself, "Gee, too bad I missed
it."
Well, today my busy-ness
took the form of reading Response Notebooks and doing a favor
for a friend. (If you are that friend and you are reading this,
don't feel guilty. I am happy happy happy to do whatever I can.
Really. It's possible that your request was the one thing that
forced me to get down to busy-ness today and procrastinate no
longer. Thank you. I accomplished some good stuff today.)
One good thing about
busy-ness is that it doesn't leave much time for one to ponder
the deeper, darker, more complex issues of the day like Who Am
I? Where Am I? Why Am I Here? What Must I Do About....? Why Do
I Feel So....? There will be plenty of time for those morose
considerations soon enough. What else are vacations for? No,
right now I'm consumed with the Big Mystery of what goes on in
the mind of a freshman who turns in a notebook that looks like
something drug out of a stinkin backalley after a month of hard
weather and harder traffic.
"But hey,"
you say, "if you're so busy, what are you doing here in
This Journal?" I can only plead for mercy. It has been a
long day, and I have been a pretty good boy. Cut me some slack,
Jack. Gimme some room, Gloom. Besides, I haven't been on This
Journal for awhile, and I fear the loss of Audience. Who would
I be without that vast, invisible horde of silent eyes which
is yourself?
I have begun a book
on shame that my brother mentioned in a note awhile ago. (Though,
if you're wondering, I didn't have time to read it today because
I was just too damn BUSY.) The authors say that shame is both
innate and learned, a psycho-biological response and a culturally
determined behavior. I'm feeling shame right now for taking up
all of this valuable cyber-space. I'm feeling shame because for
everything that I have done there is much more that I should
do. But I'll get over it.
Yesterday, while
I was busy missing Miss Emily's birthday, I was introducing my
freshmen to Buster Keaton. They knew Busta Rhymes; they knew
Chaplin, but not The Great Stone Face. I showed them The Electric
House, The Boat, and bits of other shorts. Some of
the students seemed quite happy - even delighted - with this
discovery; others were distraught with black, white, and No Sound
with fakey special effects. "You've gotta be kidding, Br.
Tom." They didn't know it, but I was rewarding them for
being not-so-bad-all-things- considered-this-quarter. And they
got to peek into Keaton's perfect universe where life-savers
vanish beneath the waves and anchors float.
|