February 21, 2013

Woke with raking scratches on my right arm, as though I had been attacked by a wild animal. They’re much too large to have been a cat, and they’re certainly mine, and I do have a vague and distant memory of trying to pull something awful from my arm in dreams.

Mikado falling into place. Karen took the directing helm, and though imperfect, that is very much better. I have a hard time getting the words out singing and dancing at once, no matter how well I knew them in the car. It’s well I didn’t have to make my living as a chorus boy. There are only five men in the chorus. That will look and, probably, sound queer. Who will be coming to this? The tolerant, I hope, though the leads are excellent. Not enjoying the nightly roundtrip to dark and distant Arden, coming home so late Sweeten Creek is empty as the aftermath of some disaster.

Steve the Plumber flatly and finally does not return to finish the work, as he made a special effort to promise to do. Let that be a lesson to me about paying before the job is done. “Oh, could you maybe write a check? . . . the guys haven’t been paid in days and boo hoo hoo. . .” So, I do, and am left with a broken wall, a ditch, a wilderness of stones. As well as a conviction of personal folly.

Finished grading the department comprehensives. Great effort was made to get everything online and accessible on Google docs and to develop a grading rubric, etc, which make everything about three times more laborious and time consuming than it was before, without changing outcomes at all. Thus the paradox of the modern age. When I was an undergraduate at Hiram, Lawrence Underwood was the registrar, and no mistakes were ever made. When I was a professor there, there were four women and a computer, and it was all a running disaster.

Hinduism in Humanities today. They always have the most questions about that, challenging its quietism in the face of injustice, jesuitically attacking what could possibly be meant by dharma (How do you know that your dharma is not to be a murderer or a rapist?), frantic to understand without experiencing, which, I keep saying, is going at it the wrong way. It’s good to see them engaged. It’s astonishing to see how hard it is to wander from established notions. Avowed Christians have an easier time understanding than our dedicated secularists. One of the front row boys kept using the term “metaphysical” as if it meant “ignorant.” I have an impulse to brush his long bangs out of his face, as if they were preventing enlightenment.

I’m less exhausted than I am afraid of being exhausted. I hoard and protect my time, shouldering off interruptions and inventing previous engagements to keep free. I still think I have some great work to do, that only vast open hours can enable. For the first time I find myself considering pleading age to be let go early, to be excused from this and that. I’m not actually tired, but I see a way of using other’s expectations that I would be to get more time for myself. So far, resisted.

Maud the Cat nestles against my side on the arm of the wooden chair. I tell her she’s the best cat in the world, and she lets it pass, acknowledging but unattached.