Wow. I'm busy! Last night I had a dream where one of my cats encountered a skunk, sniffed its butt, and then bit it on the back of the neck. For some reason I was proud. I'm not sure if there is any meaning to be gleaned from this.  The other day I was walking down the street in Lafayette and came across a pumpkin bowl that was filled with cough drops, sitting on a stoop. But it had been raining, the the bowl was full of water, and the twelve cough drops were all floating at the top. The meaning of this too, is uncertain. Happy Halloween. I have to get back to work now. Daylight savings time here we come.

Forgetting this morning's dream I was plucking weeds.



-Hosai Ozaki translated by Hiroaki Sato, from Right under the big sky, I don't wear a hat

Sunday morning. October 14th. It's fixing to rain. Rained yesterday afternoon and then got humid, low sixties but lots of warm air. The wind is blowing hard but it's a warm wind, a weird wind bringing something, probably rain. Eight weeks have passed in the semester and there are seven left. All the busy business has continued but the pressure has subsided. I'm getting to a be a faster reader, more focused and getting more comfortable with the idea that not everything is going to be relevant, and that I can be selective as to how to spend my time, what to read and what I want to know. I'm finding a rhythm to the work, one based in the week and knowing how much time I have to spend on what portion of the week. Ah! It's raining now, and the leaves are turning colors and falling off the trees. In front of my apartment there are piles of dried leaves that crunch when we walk through them, and on the well traveled parts of the side walk it's not leaves but flakes of the leaves that have been walked over, and these don't make as many sounds.

Last weekend, the "October Break", last Monday and Tuesday off, Dara came to visit. We tooled around Indiana, saw a couple of movies ("The Master", "The Thin Red Line"), made dinner, made a pie. It's stopped raining and the sun is coming out. At four I need to meet a member of my group for Second Language Acquisition and continue to work on our presentation for Monday. I'm nervous to be responsible for presenting so much material (80 minutes) on the subject of "Young Learners and Age" which, before a couple weeks ago, I knew very little about. I guess that's what I'm doing, that is, "learning" which there's been a lot of lately. I wonder if I'll forget how to write poetry, which actually, might be a really good way to write poetry. But more so, I wonder (read: am worried) if I will lose the impetus. The rhetorical mode is all about what our words "do", which poetry is not so much interested in.

Colouring of Pigeons

I've really been into this song, by The Knife and a few other musicians and made for an opera about Charles Darwin, a scientist who discovered a really big and useful idea through bit by bit accumulation of scientific observation. Is inspiring. I believe most of the lyrics come from his journals and when the opera singer starts singing his observations of birds at the end, O! For more context, this youtube version is narrated and shows the lyrics, which I would of put here on the blog but for the Swiffer ad that comes first. In other music news, I've uploaded a short little downloadable collection of songs (of my own) to my soundcloud page that I've added a link to on the right. Happy Fall.