"Sometime in the Morning"

24 May 2025: Felt the urge to listen to The Monkees on my evening walk. I remembered how much I really liked this one when I was little.

Late afternoon soak...

23 May 2025: My nightly bath is a simple luxury, a way to wind down before bed--and I love it so much. But a new(ish) player on the scene--a late afternoon soak--is also quite nice. Took one today around 4:00 when I got home from working on campus. Especially on a Friday with no plans, this earlier indulgence works really well.

"not a labor of exposition so much as a labor of discovery"

22 May 2025: Getting started in earnest working through the articles and books for the “Year’s Work in Humor Studies” that I am once again co-writing, beginning with the Twain stuff. I found myself really into Bruce Michelson’s piece about what Twain can teach us about AI. Here’s a long passage that I enthusiastically marked up (setting up Michelson’s point that Twain is a writer work turning to on this topic): 

“Utterance that matters to us is not a labor of exposition so much as a labor of discovery. We become who we are, we construct and furbish our own consciousness by struggling for the right words; and the result—again, if we are lucky—is not just felicitous utterance but deeper and richer inner life. The kind of writing that matters is never a low-engagement process of fitting discourse together like pieces from an IKEA flat-pack. The effort of revision, of ruthlessly interrogating ourselves on relationships between each possible utterance and the next, is not a tidying up but a telling of a story— in some dimensions always a fiction—of one’s own mind in motion, describing or implying cognitive and emotional journeys with more poise and clearer steadier direction than the actual jumps, backtracks, and flashes from which presentable thinking might (thanks to these private struggles to find the words and the order) eventually emerge. Which leads to at least one collateral paradox: though veteran teachers may see a measure of truth in my attempt here to describe these dynamics, they also recognize how difficult it can be to convey it, given the imperatives and longstanding practices embedded in how American colleges and universities normally teach the production of passable expository prose” (4-5).

Work Cited

Michelson, Bruce. "Mark Twain Legacies in the Dawn of Gen AI." The Mark Twain Annual, vol. 22, 2024, p. 1-20.

Old school research tools...

21 May 2025: Betty has mostly moved out of her office leaving just a few remants behind, including a big stack of these: old school volumes of the MLA Bibliography. I never had to use these paper copies--databases came just in time for me--and holy cow, I am grateful for that.

Summer Institute planning...

20 May 2025: We had a really good and productive meeting this afternoon planning for our NWP Summer Institute. I love the reminder of how smart and creative my colleagues are. 

Now I need to prepare for my "day" of the pre-institute. Here's hoping some good inspiration hits me tonight or tomorrow morning. 

"Sugar in the Tank"

19 May 2025: Digging this one...

Quiet May Sunday...

18 May 2025: Maybe the most public part of my day today was getting a breakfast sandwich at Sheetz. Didn't even really pass too many people on my walk later in the morning. Spent the rest of the day home with Jo and Veronica, just taking it easy. 

It's been a nice day overall. Finishing it up by doing some early work on this year's "Year's Work" essay for Studies in American Humor and watching the Yankees/Mets game. 

Tote painting...

17 May 2025: After a strage start and hard start to the day--meeting with the claims adjustor for my parents' house--I was glad to spend the afternoon with Jane. We painted these tote bags that came as part of an arts & crafts subscription for adults subscription that Erin and her family gave me for Christmas. Then we got lunch in town and ice-cream at Rockhill Creamery. Just a really nice day.

My tote; I am so bad at art, so I went for simple and Whitman-esque.

Jane's tote, which is much prettier and much more ambitious!

"all kinds of magic in the world..."

16 May 2025: “There are all kinds of magic in the world…And the sort of magic that ensures that when someone has decided that they would like a cat, a cat finds their way into their life” (59).

Working on some more notes for my SSAWW paper and came across this quotation that delighted me the first time I read Not Quite a Ghost. (I alluded to the book's cat in this post earlier this week.)

Makes me think of these two, who bring me so much happiness.

Work Cited

Ursu, Anne. Not Quite a Ghost. HarperCollins Publishers, 2024.

Jo, But Make It Lil Jo...

15 May 2025: Riffing on a social media account for my title here, but I realized yesterday that there's a connection between my first view of Jo (on Petfinder) and her "new" skill/habit--which she has gotten better at.

This morning, I found another example, though not as dramatic...

Fresh cut...

14 May 2025: Got my hair cut this morning and once again had a great conversation with Isabelle. This time we talked about her recent family cruise where she and her husband renewed their vows, along with her daughter and son-in-law. It was an especially fun conversation because we talked about the plans during my previous visits. Sounds like everything went really well, though she said it was tiring (ha!). She even showed me a sweet video. 

"Return need not be regression"

13 May 2025: “Power, too, can be adapted—that is, destabilized, disrupted—and again both memory and mutation, theme and variation are at work. Return need not be regression” (Hutcheon 175).

Thinking a lot about Hutcheon's work on adaptation--particularly this idea--as I conceptuatlize my SSAWW paper, about a YA book inspired by Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." 

Work Cited

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013. 

Yardwork day...

12 May 2025: I had planned to do some work in the yard today--a trip to Home Depot for some plants that I would then plant/pot when I got home. Then tomorrow, I thought I'd go to the really good nursery in Maryland for the rest of my plants and put them in the ground in the next couple of days. But the weather was so nice today and Home Depot's selections were not great. Plus, I realized that it's supposed to start raining this evening and there's rain in the forecast for until Thursday...so I also wanted to mow the lawn today. By about 9:30 a.m., I was ready to go "all in" on a yardwork day. 

Cleaned out the flower beds and then mowed the lawn (mowing over all the weeds I had pulled). Drove to the other nursery and got the good stuff. Put it all in the ground or in pots on the porch and deck. Feeling tired, but accomplished.

The SSAWW essay work I had planned for today (most of it, anyway) can wait until tomorrow--a better rainy day activity than mowing or planting! 

Jo's new skill...

11 May 2025: This one is sort of my fault: I would place a toy on top of their new scratching post for Jo to stretch up to and knock down. She loves it when I do this. But her new skill must be, in her mind, the next, natural step. 

Can't be comfortable but she does it again and again. Such a cute little weirdo.

Graduation 2025

10 May 2025: Another graduation in the books! Managed to get most of our graduates in this picture.