Reason Breeds Insanity

It is raining again this morning. Although I missed the last big bout of rain, I still wish it would go away. I like the sun. I walked the dogs this morning and when we got home, they, along with my coat, were drenched. I spent a few minutes toweling them off only to have them shake and fling their stinky dog wetness all over me and the garage! I saw the male merganser again this morning without the female. I am hoping that soon I will see a whole little troop of babies floating out in the middle of the pond with them. I love baby water fowl; they are so cute swimming along behind their parents trying to learn how to waterproof and preen.

I am considering consolidating all my blogs down into one, but I am pretty sure that no one who reads this one would be interested in reading my research. In fact, unless you love reading queer theory or fat studies, I am pretty sure that you won’t be interested. My friends and I have decided we are going to a fat studies chapbook this summer; hopefully it will contain critical work, poetry, memoir, and art. We are going to self-publish it through the English department and present about it at the first Friday forum next year if GSAB will let us. I am pretty excited, we are finally beginning a creative community at BSU like I had imagined graduate school for English to be! I am working on some creative pieces, but I think I am going to rework my conference presentation so that I can try to publish it in a respectable journal. We’ll see how that works out.

Today is going to be consumed with grading and reading. I am supposed to meet with a student to help her with her thesis statement for her paper. I am learning quickly that I wish high school teachers would give their students a bit more independence in their writing, because college freshman can’t conceive of a writing world where their teacher doesn’t tell them step-by-step what to write. Sad really. I am leaving to go to school in a few minutes and I will be there until 615 tonight. I really hate the long days, but next semester will be worse!

For the fall I am taking three classes, teaching two, and auditing one. On Mondays I have theory of creative writing from noon to 3; on Mondays and Wednesdays I have fat studies from 3 to 415; on Tuesdays and Thursdays I have creative nonfiction workshop from 330 to 445, and I am auditing Native American literature from 5-615. I am hoping to teach at 10 and 11 on Monday Wednesday and Friday or at 11 and 1230 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Basically, I will be a recluse for the semester. I may actually die. Just kidding, but maybe.

I just finished reading excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I am working on finishing it in its entirety. He will always be someone whose loss I mourn in many ways: he had conviction, he admitted mistakes, he changed his views, he was passion embodied. I can only imagine the state of race relations today if Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had not been assassinated. I know there are so many theories about each of their deaths; there are probably enough to fill several filing cabinets, but I tend to believe, as I usually do, that their deaths were some type of government conspiracy. I am sure that the idea of King and X joining forces in the late sixties, as they had planned to try to do, scared the shit out of the predominantly white government. It should have scared them. Combining the passion and brilliance of two of the greatest reformers in this country’s history, would surely have caused worldwide change. I frequently wonder how much further we would be now. Would there have been a Jena 6? Would there black men pulled over by the police for simply being black? Would it even be an issue that the democratic presidential nominees are a woman and a Black man? Would we racially idealize any ethnic group? Would we still need the United Negro College Fund? How much more progressive could we be? How little would the color of a person’s matter? Would we be fighting in Iraq? Would we respect Muslims? I can only imagine.

As I suspected, I could easily live in San Francisco. The beauty of the city is its small area, because it literally takes twenty minutes to half an hour to get out of the city to Golden Gate Park where the world is absolutely beautiful. My cousin, Jane, said that San Francisco is more like Greece than anywhere else she has been, and I can say that I must be more Greek than I usually admit. I loved it. What I loved about it was that I could breathe in the sea air and look any direction and see nothing but beauty. The weather was perfect, slow soft sunshine, a nice light breeze off the bay, and the sounds: city mixed with nature. I felt at home and comfortable in a way that I usually don’t. Have you ever been embraced by a city? I have and I miss it. Perhaps the only part that I don’t like at all is that I have such horrible respiratory problems here. Not one day in SF did I wake up congested. Not one day did I sneeze and cough and wheeze until noon. I think it was the level of humidity. So, although I loved San Francisco, and I really could see myself living there, I love it here too.

Beauty is what you make it. Muncie has some beautiful areas and Becky and I are fortunate enough to live in one. By walking from our house across the street, I can see the river. By walking a block down the river, I can cross one of the dams and the water spills over it making one of my favorite sounds. You know that gurgling, rushing, water splashing on rocks sound? If I walk a couple of miles around the river trail and past the sweet smells of QL’s, I turn on Bunch Street and eventually end up by a wetland preserve. I look forward to this summer, when the dogs and I will walk that way every morning before my class. Hopefully, the conservation is far enough along to have blooming flowers and wetland specific animals. Already, by looking carefully at the birds on the river, I have seen a pair of mergansers. However, this morning the female was missing. I hope she is merely nesting and not gone. The male looked so sad floating in the middle of the pond by himself. I have also seen some wood ducks, and this morning I saw a little muskrat swimming out into his house. I couldn’t help but smile.

We went to San Francisco to present at a conference, as I am sure I have written here before, but the amazing thing about our participation is that it didn’t just go well, we ROCKED it! When we started to present, we looked out and noticed that many of the biggest (no pun intended) names in fat studies were in the audience. I must confess that I was a bit nervous, but I didn’t need to be. Apparently, the matriarch of fat studies, Marilyn Wan (Fat?So!)
was so impressed with us that she told out professor that she felt like she could retire! They were also surprised that there is such a strong group of scholars and activists at BSU. I could go on, but I just wanted to say that we were stunned with our reception. Amazing.

My favorite parts of the trip were going to Alcatraz, visiting City Lights Books and hearing the SF poet laureate read, trekking all over SF with Jane, especially visiting Grace Cathedral, and riding the streetcar to Castro with Jim. Thus ends Corby’s Web Tour of San Francisco.

Now that I am home, I enter crunch time for school as I have three major papers to write, adn several small assignments still to do.