Tuesday is a long day at school. I use a couple hours in the morning preparing for 202, teach 202, the usual rhetoric class, then head off to support 620, the graduate writing for broadcast taught by this man who knows a good deal about writing. It's interesting to listen to him lecture. The last two classes has been about the finer points of grammar, and common mistakes that journalists often make. "Writing for the ear." Much of the grammar stuffs can be found in The Elements of Style, which I've also been reading (again) in conjunction with this class and just because it's helpful to review, and kind of interesting. Ninety five percent of it I already pretty much know in the back on my head, sub-consciously and do, and my time in the writing lab with student writing and explaining why a sentence is written in a particular way and in class, after about four hours I begin to lose a particular sharpness, no longer able to focus on what's in front of me, and instead start to focus inwardly.

After nine hours of imagined and real explanation a kind of tiredness sets in and metastasizes into the thought that something bad has happened to me. When I come home I am much more likely to quickly consume two slices of cheap pizza than make my own dinner. Pizza tastes good! but, there is a kind of little failure I feel when I go this route. I'd like to think that the feeling isn't completely my fault, a lack of self control caused by the cruel world, but that seems to be the idea that gets the ball rolling in the first place. "I deserve it." When I'm tired and drained it seems more reasonable to address the feeling directly, i.e. take a nap. Lie down and not do anything, as opposed to staying awake via life support, plugging into a video game like the basketball one I've been playing.

Which is why I'm bringing all this up in the first place: in this game there is a 'my player' mode where you design a guy ("Bucky Kat") and play him in basketball games, and if you do well you are given points to improve the guy, his jump shot or whatever. It's kind of like a role playing game, where when you kill dragon you get the sword, and then you are ready to kill the super dragon. Or kind of like real life, where if you get a book published you can get a better teaching job, or if your girlfriend would just stop doing that one thing everything would be peace. Anyway, its addictive and totally escapist, and like spending a weekend smoking crack in a locked bathroom in a basement apartment or looking at pornography, it's an experience that doesn't translate well when somebody asks "What have you been up to?" I'm getting an eerie feeling that I've written all this before. Oh well. Maybe next time I'll write something new. In other news, Miley Cyrus is testing new identities which actually seems pretty normal.

Blogs are embarrassing! San Francisco was kind of kooky today, and generally all weekend because of the Pride festival, including the parade and Backstreet Boys concert. On my way home from purchasing a small brown bathmat I traversed ten thousand lesbians marching down the street late Saturday afternoon. Only in San Francisco? Maybe. But that was yesterday. Many a leather chaps have I seen today. Though I did not see the big parade this morning, I did witness a man wearing a speedo and cowboy boots, riding a ten speed down the middle of the street at eight in the morning, so feel like I didn't miss everything.

Later on, after some cleaning, I spent an inordinate amount of time with newspaper. It was pretty awesome, for example "I mean, the show is based on the premise that there's something wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. You're just a human being. It's not easy being a human being." says Laurie Anderson about the Oprah Winfrey Show. After doing some light school work, preparing for a study group and sending out a few emails I should of sent last week, I went for a really really slow walk with a plum. The plan was to walk really slowly up to Dolores park, find a bench, and eat the plum, thereby officially enjoying the sabbath. It didn't work out exactly like that, but I did manage to go slowly, catch a good amount of orangish sun and the dregs of Pride in form of strewn beer cans and ATM receipts blowing around. The plum got eaten mid-stride. Maybe the nicest days of the year thus far? Quite warm and perfectly breezy.

Oh, by the way, remember that last post about the readership flat lining for five days? Well, I figured out that when I changed the look of the blog it changed the html code of the blog, and in that code was the tracking code, so as, the reason it flat lined was because it lost the signal. So, yeah. Roommate Chris leaves for El Salvador on Wednesday and subletter Carrie comes for a month. The first week of school is over and I think it will be a good semester. My 202 class is small, ten people and I've decided to drop one of my support classes so as I can have time to do more writing, which I admittedly have put on the back burner the last couple semesters. In theory I teach so I have time to write but if I spend all my time teaching and don't write much I get grumpy. My cats don't seem to contain many bones when it gets hot, sprawled out and slow. Okay. Bedtime. Need to get up early. Goonight.

Usually it works like this: as soon as I say something definitive I turn and do the opposite. A week ago I wrote in the blog that I didn't feel like writing and I didn't, but since then have felt like writing and have. In the mean time pretty much everybody who reads the blog stopped reading. Google offers an analytical service where I can see many many statistics about who visits the blog (minus actual identity), for example I can see the number of visitors to the blog in a day. Then it takes that and puts it on a graph, so I can see the number of visitors who visited in a week/month/year etc. and it looks a little something like this:


However in the last five days it has done this:


Which is kind of exciting in a couple of ways. The first is a freeing way, that well, great, I've lost my entire readership. I can completely change direction/identity/purpose. No readers means no pressure. Second, it means that I no longer have to worry about posting to the blog. I can just totally let it rot, like a loaf of bread wrapped in a plastic bag tucked in a drawer in an unused kitchen in a locked apartment.

But, I can't help but notice that the drop off began right after the posting two postings ago the one written a couple of days after I got back from the meditation. That posting, after that posting the reader ship dropped off dramatically. Hm. Maybe I seem affected? Less so than the last time but the last time I was so paranoid about speaking about the experience because when somebody is under the spell of something it's easy to tell...unless you're under the same spell and then it seems normal. Like stress, or the World Cup. Or having two hands and ten fingers. My cats used to watch my hands by now they look at my face. I used to look at their eyes but now watch their ears. Most of my writing has come out of anxiety and misery, small islands of clarity in the midst of confused paranoia. I fell in love with English when I went to Japan. I fell in love with Japan when I came back home. Serve! I hope nobody reads this.

Aw heck. Who am I kidding. Of course I want your attention. I'm just sore after the first week of being back in school. Rather, during the first week of school. Breaks are lovely but the transitions are awkward: meeting a new class, or two, or three; settling into a semester, trying to solve problems that may or may not exist, snacking on anxiety cakes served by fellow teachers and students. Done for the day though. Laying on my bed with the cats. Jinx is making a heavy breathing noise and the brown one is dozing on my thigh. That's all for now. Nap time.

Today the summer semester started. I've decided to write in full sentences. This morning I supported a fiction writing class. There were three students in the class who may or may not need my support services. Tomorrow is the beginning of teaching teaching for the semester. Trying to avoid the pronoun 'I' by changing the order of the words in the sentence. It's different to begin a sentence with the object rather than the subject. Or a verb, which only works in speech and in novels. Why am I writing in the blog? There were some reasons. Okay. Got it. The other day in the mail Cole sent me his latest mix. It's pop-ier than his last couple of mostly ambient mixes. Here's the link.

Speaking of Cole, he and a couple others started an ambient music group blog that posts good stuff called Field Mic. There is a link to it on the right. Lately I've been listening to the new Crystal Castles album. Lots of great punky poppy techno, though there is this track as well. It's a little harsh at first but settles into something I like a lot. Speaking of things I like a lot, the other day a small press offered to publish a manuscript of mine but I turned them down. They offered a kind of 'raw deal.' I won't go into the details but it's a good sign that after four years of arranging poems maybe I've found a winning combination. Maybe the next deal won't be so raw.

The last week before school started was pretty great, relaxing. Good weather with plenty of time to get ready for the semester, organize, comb my hair, meet people, computer music projects, read and take naps. Continuing my hipster list of consumption, I quite enjoyed reading "Out of My Skin" by John Haskell if you're looking for a short beautifully written story about illusory identity, and the other day I saw the movie "Winter's Bone" which is a really engaging suspense movie about crystal meth in rural Missouri. Highly recommended if you have time to see movies. In addition, please note my new hit single "You should be ashamed of yourself." on the music blog for this week. Oh, and do you like the new colors of the blog? Blogger had new options so I tried them (after reading something somewhere about the difficulty that people have reading gray text on black) but now can't go back to the old template so that's that. Please:

On Sunday I got back from the 12 day meditation course and was feeling a particular kind of cleaned-out-high. Not a high as much as a somewhere-else-outside-of-old-habit mode of being that generally feels good, but not in a sensational way. The course was not as "life-changing" as the last one but this is good in the sense that it wasn't as dramatic coming back and making life style changes, such as morning meditation, shifting priorities from anxious busy work to whatever I feel like, and not eating not much for dinner, because I've already been doing all that.

One thing is for certain though, that after cleaning my system out (in a very particular way...for more details, attend a course) I don't feel much like writing or pursuing any kind of creative endeavor. I don't feel much like smoking, or watching movies, or basketball, or whatever else I do for fun. I don't feel much like teaching but then again, I don't feel much like not teaching. That is to say, it cleans out my anxieties and bile so well I'm really pretty content with whatever comes up: making dinner, sitting in a park, responding to emails, etc.. But not like a vegetable the opposite of a vegetable not clinging to a schedule. One the one hand this is kind of scary in the sense that well, if I'm not doing what I usually do, than I'm not a writer, or artist or whatever. What was the point of all the work I've put into writing over the last ten years if I don't keep it up? On the other hand I'm okay with that. It's a little scary.

Specifically about the course, we spent the first four days focusing our attention and lengthening our attention spans with a meditation called Anapana. We got up at four, worked on and off until nine, totaling ten to eleven hours of sitting a day. Then we switch over to Vipassina mediation for the next five days, that is, in general, a kind of body scanning, where a sitter (like me!) develops the ability to feel sensation on every little part of the body. Once this ability develops all over the body (and really, I didn't get this far until the second time I sat a course), and done *correctly* it opens the doors on cleaning out one's system (amongst other things) through observation in a very specific way that I could not possibly do justice to in an explanation on this blog. On the last day we do Metta meditation which is a kind of love generating meditation which may or may not work because I have the heart of baboon. The end. Back to the day. No picture today.