Ill equipped

I'm not sure I'm entirely prepared to live in a town this small on my own. I mean, I have friends here, I suppose, but they're all new, and they're all colleagues. And they're all paired off. I have one single friend on the faculty, and he's my model for how to live in a small town; he goes for bike rides, he joins musical ensembles, he drives to less small towns that have coffee shops. But then, like a freakily surprising number of the faculty at Nowhere College, he's an alumnus of Nowhere College, so he's used to it. In Madison I was fine. I'd spend time on my own, I'd go for walks, I'd go sit by the lake and write. Maybe the difference is that in Madison I was almost guaranteed to run into a friend or two when I stepped out the door. Today I didn't teach, I did other work--yeah, I sometimes forget I have other work--and I stepped out of the house only once, toreplenish my caffeine supply. I'm still wearing my jammies and it's 9:30 pm. I'm thirty years old, I'm alone, and I'm unshowered. Woohoo.

I watched American Splendor tonight, and the life of Harvey Pekar, the perennially downtrodden nebbishy existential anti-hero file clerk, looked sort of brilliant and well-fulfilled.

If this is a "backwater"...

...is Manhattan a frontwater? Does anybody know the etymology of that? Who is't that can inform me?

So some bits of news. (Or olds. It hardly matters; everything runs together.) I have been asked to serve as the faculty advisor for Nowhere College's Rubik's Cube Club. Yes, that's right. Apparently the lure of the hexahedron is so strong that those yet ungotten and unborn at the time of Erno Rubik's puzzle-piphany are still practicing the art. I have a student who can do it in 20 seconds. I have seen it. It's very cute. The look on his face says "yes, I know I'm a geek, but this is the one time in my life when women look at me and say 'wow.'" So he's trying to get together a club. They'll teach others, spread the word, compete in tournaments. Yeah, that was news to me, too. Apparently some people consider it a sport.

I also recently recalled that I'm a trombonist, and got out my horn to noodle with a colleague who plays sax. I may be a pointy-headed academic, but the rest of me will be well rounded, dammit.

I am buried under the weight of many freshman papers on Hemingway. The quality of the prose is terrible, but there are occasional explosions of brilliance, or at least competence. It's like Dame Ellen Terry reading Macbeth by flashes of lightning, terrifying and inspiring all at once. Silly old dame. Or was that Sarah Siddons? Probably Siddons; that sounds like a Romantic thing to do. Ellen Terry probably read it with a cuppa tea, while lying back and thinking of England.

Was it just me, or did George Wanker Bush call his opponent "Senator Kennedy" the other night? And if so, was that stupidity, or subliminal propaganda disguised as stupidity? He did, however, promise to "incense" Americans to go to work, which is strangely appropriate. If there's anything he's proven he can do over the last few years, it's incense people.