Friday November 25, 2005
Spinning

School is winding down and up simultaneously.  The fall semester ends in less than a month, so I’m in the midst of preparing for final exams, and I’m contemplating some weighty writing projects. Are you interested in the evolution of paratextual content in 18th century British novels?  Would you like to chat about non-narrative justification for fiction from the likes of Swift, Defoe, Fielding, or Walpole? Or perhaps you are a medieval history buff, and the emergence of the nation state and the 14th century exclusion of the church from said state as espoused in Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis is more to your liking?  The paradoxes of Plurality vs. Unity in Parmenides? Give me a call.  Those topics are like fall leaves in the tornado of my brain. But hurry, because in two months, it will have twirled down my mind’s drain and dispersed into the ether.

In addition to the actual learning part of my education, I’m entangled in the red tape of applying for graduation.  Why do I have to apply for graduation?  I already applied for admittance years ago; now I have to apply to get out?  I paid for all my classes and passed them; isn’t that enough?  I guess an application at the beginning and the end makes for an ordered frame of bureaucracy.  Let’s hear it for symmetry.  I feel like the town drunk in a old western movie: the university has its blazing six guns pointed at my feet and is yelling, “dance Rummy!” I’m dancin’.  I’m dancin’!  I wouldn’t be quite as bitter if I weren’t also trying to enroll in graduate school.  I want to begin immediately after I finish in May.  If I can beat the deadlines and make it into the summer session, everything will turn itself into place so that I will be ready for work exactly one year later.  The thought of teaching a year from now gleams like a shining light at the end of a long dark twisting tunnel.  If I have to wait until September, my student teaching will extend two or three weeks into the first part of that following fall, and a full time job will be harder to acquire. 

Ruby has figured out the key to decompression and relaxation.  She dances.  We just downloaded Feist’s new album, Let It Die.  Ruby’s favorite song is track two: “Mushaboom”.  As soon as she hears Leslie’s feathery vocals, Ruby starts to spin.  Spinning and clapping are two of the best things that a small child can do.  There are many other possible toddler accomplishments, but I defy you to watch your child spinning and clapping and at that moment think of anything better.  She smiles, spins, claps and laughs until she falls down.  With a surprised look on her face, she says, “I dissy!”  “Yes sweetie, you are dizzy.”  

Ani and I are also dizzy.  Too much school and work combined with a very limited amount of sleep have pushed us to the brink of something.  I’m not sure what we are at the brink of, but I bet with a couple hours of sleep, I’d be able to tell you. Poor Ani’s job is getting busier as the holidays approach, and she spent the last week preparing for Thanksgiving dinner with no time for catnaps. (It was worth it, Turkey Day couldn’t have been better!) No one here is sleeping regularly or relaxing for more than a moment at a time, but as long as Ruby keeps spinning and dancing, we can clap with her and move our attention from the whirring crap that surrounds us and focus it where it should be, at the center of our rotating circle, on the most beautiful entity in the universe.