Sunday, August 18, 2013


 
I turn around and August is more than half way over.  It's going to be a bit busy for me the next couple of weeks in the library pulling the fall course reserve offerings together and dealing with my unending stack of meticulously color coded spreadsheets (an attempt to stem some of the chaos, but there is always still some feelings of chaos.) 

And then, sooner than not, the beginning of the semester, which always signals a quick plunge toward the end of the year.  I try not to think about how every class of college freshmen stay the same age and I get older and older and more far removed from it.  I was aghast last week when I realized that it was 20 years ago that I was in my first year at RC.  Unlike the previous year that had been sort of all over the place (fist UNC, then a community college where I took some classes) it was my first taste of life in a small, more intimate liberal arts school and I reveled in it..my classes in Shakespeare and Ethical Theory..the library where I spent all my time between classes holed up in a study carrel..the incredibly scenic campus tucked back in the woods behind the usual Rockford strip malls and fast food franchises.  I loved my classes and my teachers there, and it was like this door had been opened to another world.  I think everything felt important then..the authors I was studying, the things I was writing, the plans I was making (shakey as they were).  It's probably just nostalgia talking, but everything felt so much more real, and maybe it' the whole pre-internet thing, though I'm pretty sure I wasted just as much time with television and magazines as I do these days on the web. Or maybe it's that I payed so much more attention to the world then.


Obviously, I'm nostalgic today and missing things and people I am not really sure I want to be around. There's been a little napping, some scrambled eggs and tea,  some reading (I am re-reading everything on my bookshelf by Jenny Boully since finishing her not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them), some writing, and some cat antics..all in all a lazy Sunday like the calm before the week's storm..

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