The sun is coming through the now leafless trees and landing on top of the cats, splayed on the rug on the floor in the morning. The dining room window is now exposed and as I sit there eating macaroni off wooden plates, I can look out onto the street and whoever is out there can look back. I need to get my books and folders together and head off to school in a second,  the last day of the week before Thanksgiving. It's been much more relaxed these last couple of weeks, especially this week and the next. Relaxed in terms of urgent class work, and so I have time to read and research for the two twenty page papers I have due at the end of the semester. It's strange, different subjects ranging from identity approaches to second language acquisition, to investigating the roots of composition and where it split off from creative writing, to the work I do with my class, working on discourse communities and remediating work for different audiences. All of it's different, but it feels like it's part of the same project, and each subject or class is bleeding into each other. I guess I am the constant, and naturally, it all flows through the one making sense of it. I wonder if it would even be possible to hold all these things in mind separately. 

Meanwhile, a cat gets up and walks to another patch of sunlight, WWIII gets underway in the middle east, and Jack Gilbert, the poet, dies. Here is an excerpt from "A Brief for the Defense." Have a lovely weekend:

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.