paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- empty parking lots, fall and red balloons Everything is working up to a crescendo. I have this fantasy that all of my various projects and tasks fold up into a band of light and recede into the night sky. My week was so hectic I did not have time to line up a guest writer. So hurried that I have not collected my thoughts for days: they drift across my head like dried leaves swept across an empty parking lot. All of the cars have left for the day, the week, the holidays. The sky is gray or maybe white and the wind is demanding. On Monday I held focus groups for the program I direct. On Tuesday I met with my Milton professor because I have thought too much about my paper and wanted to make certain that I would not be causing trouble by seeing in Milton�s God a symbol of the monarchy. The professor is extremely clean cut and thorough. He reminds me of a catalog model from Eddie Bauer � live the literary life, tall and thin, in black jeans, doc martens, oxford shirts and blazers or sweaters. One day he will be a demanding and probably a commanding professor. Right now he is feeling his way � when he answers the questions of his students or makes a connection, happiness shows on his face. And in class on Thursday he was so taken with himself that he said �I�m brilliant!� out loud, and then tried to justify his joy. I liked seeing him a little more human than he typically permits. I liked hearing him compare, tritely, class to a performance. Tuesday evening, I attended a reception for an endowed chair at our business school. It was a very big deal and I wished that the office had not been so hot all day. I showed up with wilted hair and feeling a bit sweaty, despite the late fall. But I survived and managed to talk to a junior faculty member. Wednesday the Esquire told me that I ought to consider the junior faculty member dating material. Let�s hope she doesn�t try to set me up. I suppose the big deals at the reception saw us together and their wheels began turning. But he is a philosopher and environmental ethicist so it is not difficult to find enough to discuss, motivated by wanting to appear to be working the room although our networks were not in attendance. Thursday evening Quinn and I went to hear Billy Collins read. We were running later than I had wanted, although by no means late for the reading, and found ourselves in a traffic jam of cars waiting to turn into the university where Collins was reading. So, I used my head and parked elsewhere. I felt really suave being able to pull this maneuver out of my box of tricks. And we dashed over to the reading. The crowd filled an entire university gymnasium and very few people appeared forced to attend. I liked that. I enjoyed watching the crowd get settled. One always knows when it is time to begin because the crowd all of the sudden settles itself. A rather strange dynamic happens when people arrive. They crawl all over each other, wiggle out of coats, dig out notebooks and pens, wave at acquaintances. Situations like this make it incredibly important to be as nonchalant as possible but for a significant chunk of people, attending a poetry reading seemed to be something beyond the ordinary entertainment for a Thursday evening. most people seemed to never have been to a poetry reading before. The professor who organizes the series of readings couldn�t help but ask everyone to think about attending the other readings scheduled for next year. Because normally we all pack into a small art gallery space � the same 60 or so people that I see over and over again in different venues and contexts. The poetry people. Ten times that number showed up, so unexpected, the venue had to be changed. And this is a wonderful reason to change a venue or host a traffic jam. I don�t have to say I enjoyed the reading. I like the poetry of Billy Collins and appreciate the way he shares his perspective so directly and without pretense or prop. I couldn�t help but stay aware that a mass of us were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in a giant gymnasium. The basketball hoops having been mechanically raised up to the ceiling, or almost. Fragments of the painted lines in view in places on the floor where people were not sitting. And up over the poet�s head, one single red balloon lingered at the ceiling between support beams. It looked about one day from falling down, within reach of the gym maintenance crew. It�s rubber skin not drawn as tightly as it had been just the day before. And it seemed like static cling had prolonged its visit to the ceiling. But nevertheless, the poet read with one reticent balloon overhead. After the reading, I said hello to a few people, chatted quite briefly with my friend M. and Quinn and I made our way to the car. We were walking about 20 steps behind a tall and lean couple. They could have been any pair of the beautiful-in-training set. But, the man turned around and said hello and asked me how I was. It was my Milton professor. I said I was fine and asked him how he was, and he was cold. And probably thought I was stalking him until it was clear that we had each had the same big idea of where to park, Our cars were the only two cars in this almost empty parking lot. In between all of this excitement, Quinn and I worked on binders. This evening I am proud to report that we have eight of the nine volumes complete. And the ninth volume will go as quickly as possible. Because we are cutting corners to get it done! My first step is to perform an efficiency analysis on the prototype. We only have Saturday morning and all of Sunday to complete the volume. It has to happen this way. I have probably made all of $3/hour on this project which began with such hope. And I am at a crisis junction with my studies. So the last volume is getting completed this weekend. It will not be unlike how I wrote my entire annotated bibliography for Milton in one weekend. Still, I received an A and it was very well done. Because I have a knack for pulling these sorts of things out of my box of tricks. It is magic. Like sensing the phone will ring just before it does. Dreaming of things that happen. Saying a word or phrase and turning on the television or radio and hearing that word or phrase. The more observant I am, the more I conclude that the world is a special place full of incredible energy. For this energy to be positive, I have to be grounded, connected some way to the world. Otherwise, the energy and I repel each other. It is difficult to be grounded when work has hit that frenetic pace, my class is wrapping up and big papers are due and my final is hanging over my head, and no matter how hard I work and how hard all of the wonderful volunteers work, the notebooks have been an irritating constant. The binder project has swallowed the energy in the house and has not contributed anything back. It has brought tiredness and crankiness with it and ushered in some sort of fall this fall. From what I am not certain. 11:12 p.m. - 2002-11-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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