the last day of the year and i spent it working with j and damien on an old victorian on the east side of madison mixed sand in with primer and prepared new walls to match the old walls while they installed a floor where a bathtub will one day sit it was exhausting having not done a day like that for a while afterwords i napped had a cup of tea and will go out and have dinner with an old friend and some new ones at a sushi restaurant but may not go out with the crew for the gigantic count down not because its a bummer but because of todays work and have secretly been hoping to not celebrate new years waiting for an excuse for a number of years which is funny as it used to be my favorite holiday going out with friends and most certainly getting drunk and doing funny drunk things but those guys aren't here tonight and really what else is there to do once all that has been done not that there's a reason to move on but i just don't feel like it and that will have to be okay and i'll see what it feels like to not celebrate new years in grand fashion and then we can compare draw up some charts take notes and consult the experts i mean stars for how next year will turn out if next year will turn out not to rub anything in but i did see that movie i am legend and that movie no country for old men and that movie blade runner on the other hand i did see that movie juno and somebody asked me what i do for fun the other day and i answered that i watch movies which makes my answer half true more like something to do and when noticing this and then in choosing not to noticing a thud like a sack of old letters falling to the bottom of an elevator shaft, listening, and then reporting back

It's awesome: sitting in the guestroom of my parents' house, reading and writing under the warmth of a wool blanket. It snowed all day yesterday but today its just overcast. It. The weather. Things happening. Last night I went out with some old friends and a new one, and drank more than I meant to. It wasn't bad, but the same thing happened two night previous. Today I got a pair of shoes with my brother and a friend, and we ate lunch near the shoe store and talked about things German, a few movies, and sort of watched the Badger game on television. They won. Hooray. There is a month and a couple weeks between classes and I'll be here until the 15th, working with my step-dad and crew on an old Victorian house on the east side. I'll start Monday, and then New Years and then a couple weeks work and then back to Oakland. I'm thinking too much about what is okay to write and what isn't. Sticking to one topic or writing tangentially. Forgetting how to write, or how I wrote previously for this blog. What worked. Have been writing a lot in notebooks, but maybe that is a different kind of writing. Forgetting. Always a beginning. Tomorrow I'll drive up to Menasha to see and old friend and his new baby. Yesterday I dropped Amy off at the bus station.

Sitting at work is this work I'm thinking speaking lab speaking lab speaking lab where the students come and sit and we talk maybe work on pronunciation issues or simply work on fluency or work hardly at all just talk just practice talking and this is helpful we think they think somebody thinks this is helpful who keeps coming here but nobody thinks this is helpful right now as I am here alone not lonely because I have you but am alone no appointment: a ticking clock that reads 3:58. A Korean fan pinned on the wall. A hot room, an open door, a hallway. A restroom door that people come and go from. We are on the first floor but there are no windows. In a half hour a student will come give me a presentation and I will give them feedback. I received a note on my door today. It reads: Hi Tyler. This is A____ who used to attend your conversation group 6:30 on Monday! I just wanted to say Thank you and Merry Christmas!! (I can't come today group cause I have an appointment). End of note.

Earlier this year I met a Marine and we talked about weakness. That the boot camp instructors’ job is not to teach specifics, but to weed the weak out of the group, those who can’t be counted on when the situation intensifies. It made me think if I would be weeded out, and just now, it makes me think of teaching: how a portion of students will decide a given subject is not for them, and the teacher might decide a given student isn’t going to make it. No hard feelings. One of the loneliest things I’ve ever heard were the long-distance phone conversations of an old roommate, a Marine, speaking in loud, halting English to a Filipino woman he hoped to marry. She couldn’t understand a word he was saying.

On my way back from the corner store a man stopped me to say that hands in pockets are a sign of sexual frustration. I took my hands out of my pockets and continued walking down the street. He walked with me, telling me that despite the fact that we was in his late thirties, young girls were still attracted to him. And he was tired of it. I looked at him. A clean dark sweater and some jeans. His eyes were yellowed and his breath stank. He asked to see my hands. “Yep,” he said, “stay off the…”

“drugs?” I suggested. “The Internet.” he finished, and we parted.

border="0", is what it says every time I open a window for a new post. I've been deleting it but I wanted to show you, my friend, that it says border= "0" and what this feels like exactly. Do you have the feeling? Good. It's a sunny but kind of a chilly day in Oakland, and I say that knowing that California has made me weak. I no longer understand what cold means. I was working on things I found in my notebook this morning and had posted a couple but then removed them because it didn't feel quite right. Plus, the person who commented anonymously three postings ago kind of freaked me out due to my inability to receive compliments and my trouble with the word 'genius' so instead of rising to that challenge I'll just ramble on to fill the space so that posting gets far away from the first thing as possible. These are the kinds of problems that come up once the empire gets established: maintaining its borders. Of course I could just erase the compliment but that seems unfair. "One confides in what has no concealed creator" writes Wallace Stevens, and that seems like a reasonable policy to me. In other news I had a good if unusual weekend hanging out with two factions of friends, and spending most of Sunday doing absolutely nothing. It was different and feel like I'm in some kind of alternative head space in that it doesn't feel muddled like it usually does on Monday. I'm thinking of eating a can of chili. This is the kind clarity that comes with striking out of the usual. Also, we got a Christmas tree that is still alive I mean growing in a pot. It's nice and small. A fir but I'm not sure what kind of fir. Maybe its a spruce and they lied to us, but I think its a fir. I'm coming to realize that its a good idea to set aside time to do what I want to do, and sticking to that schedule. In the past I've believed myself to be enormously flexible and okay with whatever. Unfortunately this wasn't true at all. Amy compared my lack of plant watering to a boy who got bored with his pet turtle. Charles Schultz is quoted as saying "It took me a long time to become a human being."

One day lighting off bottle rockets with my brother, we went back inside to watch to TV to be alerted by our baby sitter that the field behind the house was on fire. Luckily she knew what to do, and equipped us with wet rags and a bucket filled with water. We ran out and wapped the flames down. This was one time. Another time we lit a field on fire on accident and scorched fifteen feet of fence. Another time we accidentally burnt down the large hollow tree adjacent to our house. Fireworks are wasted in the day.