Hello there. Welcome to The Flow and the Ebb, the journal of Eric Scott.

There's a bunch of stuff in here- personal stuff, school stuff, geek stuff. But the main stuff is the fiction and poetry. For ease of use, this post exists as a quick guide to everything like that in the journal.

Here's the directory...

( Stories )
( Songs and Poems )

"A finished thing is a dead thing."

You know the drill. You want me to ask you five questions? Reply with "Resistance is Futile" and I'll throw something at you.

These are for ermenrich.

1. What do you miss about Kirksville that might surprise people?

I used to have this thing I called my "perfect day." I would wake up late, not put clothes on for a long time, and write or play WoW or generally have fun. At about seven PM I would walk to downtown and buy dinner at a place that was too expensive for my budget (frequently the Wooden Nickel), eat it slowly, then come home and do nothing again. When it worked right, I barely spoke to another human all day.

I realize this seems like the kind of thing you could do anywhere, but really, it was all about my apartment in Kirksville and the walk downtown that made it beautiful.

2. "Argen the Demon" gets optioned for a movie/TV deal. Who would you want to be involved (director, actors, technical advisers, etc.)?

Oh, hell, I don't know. I've always said I wanted the lead male singer from the RenFaire band 3 Pints Gone to play McNab. I've also thought in the past that Dominic Monohagn (sp?) would make an okay Argen.

3. If you could go back in time and deliver one message to your younger self, what would it be?

I think I would give my 15-year-old self a copy of my story "Raining In January" and just write "BE HAPPIER THAN THIS" at the top of it.

4. The lady or the tiger?

Am I the suitor or the princess? In either case, probably the Lady, though for different reasons. If I'm the suitor, I'd prefer the Lady because, uhm, I don't want to be ripped to shreds by a tiger and even if the marriage sucks, there's probably a way to escape. Meanwhile, if I'm the princess, there's no way I could subject anyone to death by tiger for the simple crime of loving me.

5. Besides Neil Gaiman, what author would you want to critique your work?

Hrm. That's a really difficult question, I have to say. There are many authors whose work I enjoy, but "enjoyment" isn't quite the same as "wish you would critique mine," because a lot of the authors I like write very differently than I do.

I think I would say Garrison Keillor, because at least for the moment, much of what I want to accomplish with my writing is a sense of community and humanity, and I don't think any body of work has accomplished that so well as News from Lake Wobegon.

Memoir assignment for Bob's class.

I, Panda
by Eric Scott

Mimi mistook me for a raccoon. In her defense, for decades scientists made the same mistake. The black circles around my species’s eyes look distinctively raccoon-like, and no one would question that our red cousins are related to them. Only recently have the taxonomists finally determined that we belong to the family ursidae rather than the raccoon’s procyonidae. But Mimi was incorrect. I was not a raccoon. I was a giant panda.

I sat in the woods next to a tiki torch, a 23 year old man in a black sweat-suit with a stitched-on white belly, my face covered in greasepaint. I wore black mouse ears and black gloves as well. I did this over Memorial Day weekend 2009, and even at night, the hot, damp air tempted me to wipe my forehead, an act I had to resist in order to preserve my costume. Mimi had come from the Owl up the path, who beneath his dark glasses and feathery cloak was my old friend Joe Geimer. I wondered often that night if Joe felt as ridiculous as I did.

Joe and I, under the direction of his sister Sarah, the head of the Heartland Spiritual Alliance’s Rites of Passage committee, were stationed along the Heartland Pagan Festival’s Vision Quest trail. Held on Saturday night during the five day long festival, the Vision Quest took festival-goers on a walk along a dirt path through the woods of the Gaea Retreat Center in MacLouth, Kan. Chemical glow-sticks lit the path, but rocks and hills – and, once, escaped cows from the farm on the other side of a poorly maintained fence – could still surprise visitors. One year you would have met each of the major arcana of the Tarot deck; another year, each zodiac sign. 2009 had animals: a Dog, a Hart, and some more fantastic creatures like a Dragon. For the trail-walker, the journey took about 45 minutes, not counting the long line at the front gate. For those of us sitting in the woods wearing costumes, the night would be much longer.

I did the Vision Quest for a couple of reasons. Since I had moved to Kansas City the year before, living by myself for the first time, Sarah had kept me from starving when money got tight and picked me up from train stations at one in the morning with no notice. She needed animals for the Vision Quest, so I did it for her. On a mercenary level, attending Heartland as a committee member, rather than a normal festival-goer, saved me $200. In exchange, I spent Saturday night dressed like a panda. I had a little clearing about a third of the way along the path, with a long thin vine hanging in the center which I could drape myself over. I nibbled on a few long grass blades to try and get into the spirit, but eventually I switched over to the animal crackers inside the brown paper bag Sarah had given me earlier in the afternoon.

When people came into my area – I liked to think of it as my grove – I gave them a little speech about the importance of mystery and how spiritually depended on accepting the unknown. This was introductory Taoism, which seemed to fit my appearance. I began the speech by asking my visitor a question. “What’s something you don’t understand?”

A man in thick glasses and a black t-shirt did not understand why his wife wouldn’t sleep with him. A middle-aged woman did not understand why she had come back to her husband after a decade of separation. An old man, white-bearded with a St. Louis Rams shirt, told me he had no mysteries – experience had already taught him everything important. They told these things to a man in panda make-up. I listened and gave my best advice: embrace life’s mysteries, don’t worry about knowing so much as understanding. I hoped to the gods that they would repeat their worries to somebody more qualified.

After the old man left, one of the Rites of Passage members who walked the trail looking for anyone who got lost or hurt stepped into the firelight of my grove and tapped on his watch. “Look,” he said, “I know you’re giving everybody their little mystical experience here, but could you move faster? People are getting stacked up at the Owl.”

A woman entered my grove after he left: coppery blond hair, hips like Innana’s. She wore flip-flops and a green sarong. I waved her in and asked her to sit down. When her eyes had adjusted to the firelight, she smiled. “Why, hello, Mister Raccoon,” she said.

I realized I had seen her the night before at the fire circle atop the hill. She danced naked except for props: at times, a curved sword, which she balanced on her head, and at other times, a brown snake, draped over her shoulders or held in her hands being offered the warmth of the flames. I had watched this woman, desired her, remembering Joe’s brother’s claims of the easy and remorseless sex to be found at Heartland. I never said a word to her. I never expected I would.

“Hello,” I said to the girl whose name, I would find out later, was Mimi. “Welcome to my grove. This is a place of contemplation and mystery.” Her freckles curved into a smile. “And I’d like to begin with a question. Tell me about something you don’t understand.”

“Something I don’t understand,” she murmured, and started to think about it. I was afraid the committeeman waited just outside the torchlight, timing me, and wished she would hurry. “I don’t understand my path,” she said, at last. “I don’t understand why I believe the things I do.”

“Well,” I asked, “what do you believe?”

“I’ve been reading about my god,” she said, and paused. “I think I believe in him in a way that’s different from everyone else. I think he was a trickster, more like Loki than Apollo, if that makes sense.”

“Who are we talking about?”

She pursed her lips. I knew the look; I had given it before, myself. She was afraid of being judged. What belief would make her afraid of judgment at a festival where a featured speaker held a workshop on “kink magic,” I didn’t know. She sat there in silence for another moment, and my fear that the committeeman would return grew. Then I realized I had taken her hand into mine, a gesture I would never have done outside the panda costume.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Tell me.”

“Jesus.”

It took me a moment to understand that she had not used an exclamation. “Jesus is your god? You’re a Christian?” I remembered the curving sway of her fire-dance, and thought it didn’t add up at all.

She nodded. “A kind of… Well, I think of myself as kind of a mystic. But yes, a Christian mystic. This is my first Heartland and I wasn’t really sure what to expect, and there’s just so much going on here. I’ve been going to all these workshops and talks and it all sounds so interesting. But I’m not sure I’m supposed to like it. I’m not sure I’m doing the right things.” She looked up at me, her face still held in that judgment-fearing smile. “Does that make sense?”

“Yes, perfect sense,” I said.

Part of me watched this scene in disbelief: this was all backwards. How many pagan teenagers had I known who had this same conversation in reverse? I had friends who had been raised in Christian households who discovered Wicca in middle school and thought it sounded cool and rebellious, and they always wanted some permission to believe in the Goddess. Now this woman came to me, a pagan, and seemed to ask permission to believe in Jesus.

The panda told that part of me to quiet down and listen.

“If Jesus is your god and he loves you,” I said, “then don’t worry about being on a path at all. Just go where you happen to go. Appreciate the things he gives you to see and taste. Believe everything it seems like you should believe.” I squeezed her hand and let go. “Don’t worry about paths. You make a path by walking it.”

Mimi sat still, perhaps waiting to see if I would say anything else, then leaned forward and kissed me on my black nose. I didn’t worry about her smudging away the makeup. “You’re a very helpful raccoon.” Then she stood up and walked on.

I heard the long-suffering sigh of the committeeman and the sounds of other voices coming toward my grove. I picked a blade of the long grass and nibbled on it.

“Panda,” I finally corrected her, just before my next visitor arrived. “Not a raccoon. A panda.”

I have two stacks of papers to grade, an annotated bibliography to write, an article to finish, four short stories and half a novel to read, a cold, and a girl I love, love, love.

It was a pretty good weekend.

I didn't mention this before, but the night before I left for the Utopian Studies conference I went to the 96.5 The Buzz Halloweenie Roast concert at the Beaumont Club here in KC. I saw the band Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears there, and they were pretty awesome. I dig their current single, "Get Yo' Shit," a lot: it's funky, it's quite funny, and musically it's got a hell of lot more substance than most current bands.

Naturally, a song called "Get Yo' Shit" has some vulgarity, but honestly, it's way tamer than a lot of songs on the radio these days.



Other bands there:
-White Rabbits: Didn't see them because my friends are slow moving creatures.
-The Ravenettes: okay, kind of bland. Fell into one of the traps a lot of indie bands seem to fall into: they forgot that, in rock and roll, something needs to wail. Thin, repetitive instrumentation does not a great set make.
-Flock of Seagulls: You know it's bad when you introduce your last song -- the only one anybody knows -- by saying "Let's go back in time to 1982! ...or was it '83?"
-Jet: Jet was fucking amazing. They're great live.

Help me out here. I'm trying to remember some song lyrics, but one word keeps slipping my mind. "When the moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie, that's..."

So we workshopped Over the Rainbow last night. There were a number of positive responses (including what I consider the most important compliments, namely that people who know nothing about paganism are frequently expressing how "included" they feel in my stories, how they feel educated by them but not preached to) and a couple of negative ones (mostly the feeling that there wasn't enough conflict in the story.) Admittedly, that might be fair. Even Argen the Demon had a meditative tone throughout most of it, and that was a story about an ass-kicking vigilante. Now that I'm writing stories about "real" people, my conflicts have been even quieter, verging on unspoken in some cases.

When I presented Perfect Love and Perfect Trust, some writers thought that Andy was essentially without conflict and that Dottie should have been the point of view character; Over the Rainbow got the opposite response, with some saying that Dottie didn't have anything wrong with her* and that Andy was the dynamic, interesting one, and therefore the story should have been told through his eyes. I don't really agree with either of those opinions, and I wonder if that's just a divide between my opinions as a writer and those of my classmates and professors. Both of those stories seem to me to really be about the character I wrote from the perspective of; Over the Rainbow in particular, though it might seem like it's about Andy lashing out at Dottie over his mother's death, is, to me, really about Dottie finally making a connection and starting to find her way back from her alienation. That's why the most important line is the final one, where she finally takes Andy's hand. That gesture is much more about her than it is about Andy; while it's meant to comfort him, it expresses that she's realized how important he's been to her life, how important her pagan family has been.

Granted, all that probably makes a lot more sense to people who have read Surrender Dorothy and Perfect Love and Perfect Trust, which most of my class had not.

A couple other things people brought up:

-if these are pagans, why are they doing something Buddhist? (Probably resolvable by having Peter say something about their willingness to incorporate elements of many traditions. This might be a place where my pagan upbringing is coloring my expectations of the reader; it just isn't weird to me that Wiccans would steal something from any tradition that was useful to them.)

-what's with all the Wizard of Oz references? (Again, they make sense if you've read Surrender Dorothy. I'm not sure what to do to make them more obviously relevant in Over the Rainbow.)

-is Andy really trying to guilt Dottie into having ritualistic pity-sex? (No, seriously, this came up.)

-is it okay to have a happy ending? (To which I say, yes, it's okay to have one fucking happy ending in a collection of stories, and if you don't think so, fuck you. It wasn't like it was "happily ever after," dudes.)

But overall, the response was pretty good, and it identified some places where I'll need to address the story's ability to stand apart from Surrender Dorothy and Perfect Love and Perfect Trust. Having finished this, I know I need to go back and change both of those stories considerably to make the triptych stronger. (Andy's absence from Surrender Dorothy, in particular, now feels very strange.)

-E

*No, really, I did a double-take when I heard that. They whole idea of Dottie is that she's screwed up and lonely! *L* This is the character who, when one of the other writers read her in Surrender Dorothy, said, "She was so unpleasant that I didn't want to think about her afterwards."

You may want to read Surrender Dorothy and Perfect Love and Perfect Trust first, as this is a sequel to those stories.

This story is tentatively meant to be the closing piece in my thesis project.

Over the Rainbow
by Eric Scott

Dottie’s mother’s hair, once black as the Wicked Witch’s habit, had been sprouting gray strands for forty-nine days. They swallowed her head, growing like lichen. The patches of silver betrayed her mother’s constant harried smile, as did the new creases magnified by her eyeglasses and the tiny weariness that had crept into her steps. Little things, things most people wouldn’t immediately notice, but Dottie did. Dottie noticed everything.

( Welcome to the Elysian Fields )

( One enormous altar )

( The Green Man was nowhere to be found )

I stole many, many details from the stories of many, many people in my life for this one; thanks to everyone who I blatantly stole from.

1. You may know of my ongoing clash of the titans psychodrama struggle of the will difficulties in my Magazine Nonfiction class this semester. Well, the way this course is set up, we turn in a query letter the first week, then the first two pages of an article, then the whole article. So I turned in my last query letter, and got it back last week. Bob the professor said I had no angle to my topic, no "story," and gave the letter a C. I freaked out a little. I turned in the first two pages, which were based on the query letter, because I had to, but then I went home and scrapped the whole thing and rewrote everything with a new angle. Went to class last night, turned in the article, got back the scrapped first two pages.

It's the only thing Bob's ever written "this is good" on.

Even when I win, I lose.

2. Things to do in the next week:
-Write a critical analysis of an article for C&C
-Read stuff for all classes
-Grade two rounds of minipapers
-Comment on a round of rough drafts
-Write a new short story (tentatively, it'll be the third Dottie story, "Over the Rainbow")
-Get a talking copy of my paper ready for the Utopian Studies conference
-Read two more short stories for fiction workshop and comment on them
-Sleep, maybe, if I'm lucky

"The Doubting Altar"

“Because,” the old man said, after some time, “there is blood. But there is also gratitude.”
-Neil Gaiman, American Gods

My uncle says I don’t pray enough:
“You can’t just have an altar
sitting in your living room, collecting dust.
You have to sit, you have to worship,
you have to sacrifice.
If you can’t do that,
can you really call yourself a pagan?”

Well, I have an altar: a chipped black TV stand
laden with statues of Odin, Thor, Horus, Pan,
the Willendorf Woman, the nameless Nile goddess.
I try to keep a cup of water filled for them
(“Water?” says my uncle. “After all the gods have done,
can’t you spare a little wine?”)
and put out something sweet once a week,
when I remember,
which I rarely do.

(“These cookies are dusty! Dusty!” he says.
“I ask you, boy, how would you feel
if someone offered you a snack coated in dust?”)

I used to be better.
When I started college I kept an altar,
put it atop the wardrobe at the foot of my bunk.
Every night I would carry the chalice to the men’s room
to fill it with tap water three times,
once for me, once for the earth, once for the gods.
My roommate laughed at my chanting,
asked what all the candles and incense were for.
“Because they’re important,” I would say.
“Because they mean something to me.”

I suppose they did, then: I brought my house-gods
to my strange new land for comfort.
But now I live in a land newer and stranger still,
and I forget; with no one to hear the chants
or smell the incense but me,
somehow the ritual means less,
is somehow easier to doubt.

I do not know my Tarot;
I do not know my runes.
Alone in my apartment, I neglect the esbats,
and sometimes don’t make it home to turn the wheel.
But I do know the names of the gods:
Odin, the ecstasy of breathing,
Thor, the thunder across the plains,
Harmachis, the hawk-on-the-horizon.
I walk down slate gray streets
and I know they walk with me.
I know others attend more carefully to their altars,
remember to light their candles
and set out their dishes of fairie-milk,
but I am myself an altar,
built by my uncle, by my family, by my gods,
and every spark of synapse in my head
is one I’ve made for them.

My uncle is right: I don’t pray enough.
I only pray when I breathe.

-10/15/2009

WARNING: Totally wrote this at 2:30 AM, dudes.

I started this journal about seven years ago, on November 1st 2002. Sometimes that's hard to believe. I know the older people who read this journal will probably give me hell for it, but it's hard to remember being fifteen, really; completely different person. Some days I feel like I don't have much in common with that kid anymore. But oddly, I feel like I might have even less in common with the person I was at sixteen, which is kind of a shame. I liked being sixteen.

Ask any of my friends from back then, and they'll tell you: I was obnoxiously optimistic back then. I prided myself on it. While most of my friends hated high school, even at Metro, I loved it- at least those last two years. And sometimes that amazes me too, because some of the worst things that ever happened to me happened in those two years... But I always foresaw everything turning out alright. That was the primary theme of this journal, in fact. I trusted the future. I might have been a better Taoist back then. It's hard to know.

Now I just know that I am something quite different. Six years of college and graduate school have had their effect: the Economon effect from high school, in which one starts to analyze everything one encounters, only becomes more and more pronounced with time. I can't help it. I don't experience anything anymore without analyzing it, watching out for contradictions, looking for ulterior motives, for things to doubt. And I don't just mean movies or books, though those are the obvious ones: I mean everything. Every conversation I have. Every website I surf. Everything I, myself, do: I know better than anyone what's going on in my own head, after all. I often feel like I'm the least spontaneous person I know, because I calculate everything. Even breakdancing. Maybe especially breakdancing.

I doubt. It's what I do. And while I'm sure that makes me a better scholar, sometimes I do wonder if it really makes me a better human being. I have a hard time believing anything anymore, because everything-- everything-- is cracked, is broken, is lying, is contradictory, up to and certainly including myself. I can't listen to American Idiot without reflecting on how it starts to contradict itself about halfway through, for Christ's sake.

And because I doubt, I worry: I've worried since the day I graduated from Truman whether I've gone off on a foolish, self-important bent in my life, and whether this whole creative writing graduate school schtick is ultimately worth it. Certainly I get moments where it clearly is, and there doesn't seem to be any way of refuting it- if I had never come to UMKC, I would never have written Three Encounters with the Gods and never would have had the three hours of completely transcendent, crying-in-joy bliss I had last Sunday- but I know, because I promised Dr. Davis that I knew, that I got into a bad path for a career. PhDs are difficult to obtain, but good professorships are even harder; many academics have ended up in a position where they make virtually minimum wage doing adjunct work because nobody will hire them for tenure track jobs. The man I admire more than anybody else I've ever worked with is one such case.

You know? That could be me. Statistically, it probably will be me. My excuse has always been willful, heroic ignorance of the odds, but the further I go, the less I can summon up that particular strength. By many measurements, I'm doing pretty well at my chosen goals, but...

But I can't trust it.

And so I doubt.
And so I worry.
And so I go on.

Note that several of these states I only halfway consider myself to have visited, namely Georgia and California, which I've only visited in the sense that I've changed planes in San Francisco and Atlanta. I also feel I may have set foot in Montana at some point, but damned if I remember for sure. And who the hell knows about New England; I'll let Harry correct me on that.


visited 37 states (74%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

I will be reading from my fiction at the Plaza Branch Public Library (4801 Main St. in Kansas City, MO) at 7:00 PM on Friday, October 16th as a part of UMKC's Working Words series. If you live in the area (or feel like making the trek to KC, I suppose!), I would love to see you there.

Most likely I'll be reading Three Encounters with the Gods, seeing as, you know, it's the one with my big news attached to it.

-E

As I walked to class this morning, my mind still dizzy with yesterday's news, I remembered Friday night: sitting at Ryan and Nicole's, passing around my bottle of Yellowstone mead. I drank it by mouthfuls, letting each one rest long enough that my tongue began to feel numb, and gave silent thanks to Odin and prayers for the future. Nothing in particular, just for good things. And I think, it must have been the mead.

And another part of me says, Eric, that's silly. Sven Davisson had no idea you were praying over a bottle of mead Friday night. He read your story, he thought it was good, he accepted it for publication. There's nothing mystical about that at all.

And then the first part of me says, That's all very true. But it was the mead anyway.

Ahem.

"Three Encounters with the Gods" has been selected for publication in issue 8.2 of Ashe Journal.

You guys, I'm being published.

I'm probably not going to sleep tonight.

-E

My lust is a microscope: cold, precise, and objective. That’s not to say that I don’t want. I want more than anything. But my lust for you is the same as my lust for a Caravaggio painting, for a Stein poem, for a Miles trumpet line. I am not so interested in you, dear, as what you could mean, what you could represent. The flame of my desire is indeed gemlike: rigid, hard, sharp enough to cut.

But do not think this is something other than lust, dear. It is. It’s just the lust of Apollo, and not of Dionysus.

If you haven't heard, in Staffordshire a large Anglo-Saxon gold hoard has been discovered.

Obviously as a medievalist I find this terribly exciting, but in all honesty there's not a lot out there yet. They've announced there's about 1500 pieces, and some are calling it a more significant find than Sutton Hoo in 1939. (I personally think that's a little presumptuous, since the big deal at Sutton Hoo was the insight into funeral practices; this find, as I understand it, is just a bunch of warrior loot, and has no domestic items at all. This makes me suspect it won't drastically alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon culture, though it should lead to a lot of insights into their goldworking.) It will take years to determine its full archeological ramifications: right now we can pretty much just say "wow, that's a ton of things to add to our historical record. Awesome!"

What's more interesting right now is the media representation of the event. Many of the reports coming out are similar to the AP report I just pointed out: reprints of the press release, more or less. The Guardian has a good piece on the overall story of the archeology and the potential impact on the field of Anglo-Saxon Studies. The Times Online focuses a bit more on the personal reactions of some of the archeologists, particularly the detail that the pieces brought tears to one expert's eyes.

Some are focusing on the metal detectorist that unearthed it in the first place. The BBC notes this as being the "highlight of Terry Herbert's 18 year long hobby". (The BBC of course has a broader article about the dig itself too.) He's even quoted as saying "It's been more fun than winning the lottery." Oddly enough, the same man is said by SkyNews to be glad to be rid of it, because finding the hoard was too much of a hassle; their article makes it read as though Mr. Herbert really wishes he hadn't been responsible for one of the best finds in archeological history. Although the article itself is mostly a retread of the Guardian information, FOX News leads with Jobless Man Uncovers Gold Hoard With Metal Detector." And, not to my great surprise, the Financial Times lets us know that a Metal detector enthusiast strikes gold and focuses on that sweet, sweet multi-million pound payout going to Mr. Herbert and the landowner. The phrase "Anglo-Saxon" doesn't even show up until halfway through the second paragraph. It does make sure to inform us that Mr. Herbert intends to buy a bungalow.

I find it very interesting how many of the articles don't really have anything to say about the archeological significance (besides "the biggest hoard ever" and a few notes about how the Anglo-Saxons were the guys who wrote Beowulf) but do make a big deal out of Mr. Herbert's unemployment. I suppose it's an attempt to add a human element to a story that might seem dull and unimportant to people not already interested in the Middle Ages, but it makes me uneasy. Would the story gain much if Mr. Herbert had been an accountant? I understand that perhaps they don't want to lead with simply "A man found this hoard," but there's a perfectly good descriptor for him already: "Metal Detectorist." "A Staffordshire Metal Detectorist Discovers Vast Anglo-Saxon Hoard." That's a good headline. Why do we care so much about whether he has a typical job?

(The indignant scholar in me also wants to ask why we care so damn much about how much the treasure is worth at auction rather than how much it's worth in terms of furthering our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxons, but I conceded that battle.)

I'm going to be following this for sure...

-E

Good news: My plan of "powernap from 12:30 to 3:30 AM then get up and grade all those essays" worked out.

Bad news: My plan of "powernap from 12:30 to 3:30 AM then get up and grade all those essays" means I've already been awake and working for six hours on three hours of sleep.

Ugly news: The day ain't done yet, buckos.

Ugh. I feel kind of queasy and generally ill-humored, and didn't really sleep well last night. But I also have at least a hundred* essays to comment on...

Hrm. We'll see. I think this Wednesday should be the end of The Period That Is Substantially Longer Than A Week From Hell, but then, I thought that about last Wednesday too.

Also, this weekend I managed to top a dubious Heartland accomplishment with an even more dubious one.

-E

*More like 24.

I am a little sad to discover that Beck is saying "soy un perdedor" and not "sodium pentethol." I thought the latter made a lot of sense.

-E