Wednesday (two blog posts in a row!) Musings

As the summer semester begins to wind down, I’ve decided to make a few resolutions. I will get back to blogging. I will also get back to exercising, which I’ve been doing fairly regularly but fell into a brief lapse last week. I’ve decided that since I quit the gym and started working out at home, I’m going to go back to sweating in the morning. It’s easier and let’s face it, I am not a late afternoon person. This is why I teach in the morning.
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From “Dream”

There used to books of dream:
every dream had a symbolic meaning.
And the old Chinese believed
that dreams implied their reversal:
a dream of travel meant you’d stay at home,
a dream of death meant longer life.

Yes, yes! Surely my beloved in my dream
was saying she loved only me.

The coolness in your eyes, love, was really heat,
your wish to range was you renewal of allegiance;
those prying others were you and I ourselves,
beholding one another’s fealty, one another’s fire.

C.K. Williams
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I love this piece published in Esquire because I often feel the same way about recommendations my students make to me about books:

I’ve never read a novel by Nicholas Sparks for the same reason I’ve never seen a movie starring Ashton Kutcher: because I’m stupid, yeah, but I’m not that stupid. But the problem with avoiding stupid books is that you end up avoiding the books that people actually read. This makes you feel out of touch. Like one of those elitist wimps whom fat guys on the radio are always making fun of.

This type of logic is what prompted me to delve into Stephanie Myer, Jodi Picoult and Mr. Sparks himself. I didn’t get more than fifty pages into any of their books and I won’t pick any of them up ever again. If not reading these authors is being out of touch, well, ignorance is bliss.
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