Not long ago, I heard from my friend Marla. She and I pleasantly endured the rigors of grad school. The kind words she emailed me made me miss her and my friends and reminisce about those days...and I thought about...

How there is so VERY, VERY little to say about Tuman, yet we always talked about him

The struggle not to call our college students "kids"

The chianti, the pesto pizza from DePalmas, and the sleepovers ruled by Claire Danes and My So Called Life

Co-teachers, co-teachers, co-teachers...whose was having lesbian affair, what Heather's wore to class today, and how mine would lie about grammar and literature to a full class with no hestitation ("enjambment is a modern convention")

Our "offices" in Manly Hall, Center for Women's Studies and site of the future movie Bats, Cats, and Rats (when someone finally gets around to writing a screenplay for it)

Sentence combining worksheets...particularly the one about the people who dress up as mermaids in Florida...can't get it out of my head

The crime tape surrounding the office of the woman who illegally sold desk copies over the Internet

Kamikaze squirrels who'd throw themselves into generators once a month, cutting off the power in out loverly blue-painted classrooms overlooking the Quad

The Globe, the 15th Street Diner, Swen, and all those other places I'd frequent but can't name at the moment (although the thought of their food draws unsolicited drool)

Defense week...the nausea...the celebrating...Aristotle's "special" number

Tying bows on Heather's wedding shower invitations

The shelter and priviledge studying literature afforded, juxtaposed with the reality of the Twin Towers tragedy followed by Lisa's husband going to Iraq

Sleeping with a hammer for months after reading Red Dragon for Monster class

The photo of Marla and David and the canoe (present) at their wedding reception

Everyone exercising GRRRREAT restraint when Logan said "Irregardless" in class

The meeting with Rand where he told me that there were more painful ways to lose one's virginity than understanding that Shakespeare was a great religious poet

Well, these are some of my favorites...and as Mike Shula has so recently emphasized, it's good thing our time is limited at the U of A, else posts would be so much longer.

i love you THIS MUCH

this week

I have been a casket. I have had a dead person inside me.

I have been an inconvenience to almost everyone I know.

I have cried with vacant eyes and pale lips and without regard to who was around.

I lost a liter of blood. That seems about right for a broken heart.

I have felt anger, confusion, grief, and guilt.

I have not known how to cross the chasm between hurt and heal. But I have wanted to.