October 13, 2017

Days of school alternating with days in the garden, both leaving me exhausted. Restored much that I allowed be gobbled up by grass during the summer. Transplanted struggling acanthus. After trying for several years, and futilely planting bare sticks that mail-order nurseries claimed were sassafras, I finally found the real thing at Reems Creek, and bought me two. The sassafras makes me unaccountably happy. The sweaty burly nurseryman was inexplicably to my taste. 

My story of disappointment in Vienna has been accepted for publication.

Good classes, except when giving presentations, my students refuse to attempt pronunciation of foreign words. “You’re the specialist now,” I want to shriek, “say the damn words correctly!” Students are not taught boldness; they are taught resentment, which looks similar, sometimes, but is really very different.

Do the ones who do badly actually not know they’re doing badly?

Fury over the impossible form the New School sends in order for us to get our pittance of honorarium. Necessary forms are literally unavailable. A tentacle of the bureaucrafication of the whole world of education, where nothing, now, can be accomplished without a blizzard of steps and paperwork necessary only because someone is being paid to require it. Even as every advancement at UNCA is hedged about with sidesteps and blind alleys, jackals which must have their little bite. Almost fainted when I actually got my travel reimbursement this morning. I’d given it up in my heart because one document they said they required did not exist and never had existed. Assumed that would be the end of it. 

The postcards for Uranium 235 arrived, and they were well.

Good choir rehearsal, all Brahms. Cantaria rehearsal at which I never quite lost my temper, and that is notable.