Tonight, while giving the Writing Proficiency Exam...

a student named James asked me what I would like to do when I graduate.
I said, "Maybe work for a publishing house...."
He said, "Like the one that gives away a million dollars?!"

Yeah, maybe I will be Ed McMahon's personal assistant, genius.

Some photos from the Austin trip...

Ashley and me after Maria's show.


Ashley, me, Maria Bamford (funniest female comedian ever), and Shannon.


Miss Maria Bamford and her groupies, making some crazy faces.


Photo taken at Star Seeds Cafe after staying up all night with Shannon. This is us in a state of ultimate delirium.

Everyone knows...

Over My Head (Cable Car) -- The Fray

I never knew
I never knew that everything was falling through
That everyone I knew was waiting on a queue
To turn and run when all I needed was the truth
But that's how it's got to be
It's coming down to nothing more than apathy
I'd rather run the other way than stay and see
The smoke and who's still standing when it clears

Everyone knows I'm in
Over my head
With eight seconds left in overtime
She's on your mind

Let's rearrange
I wish you were a stranger I could disengage
Just say that we agree and then never change
Soften a bit until we all just get along
But that's disregard
Find another friend and you discard
As you lose the argument in a cable car
Hanging above as the canyon comes between

Everyone knows I'm in
Over my head
With eight seconds left in overtime
She's on your mind

And suddenly I become a part of your past
I'm becoming the part that don't last
I'm losing you and its effortless
Without a sound we lose sight of the ground
In the throw around
Never thought that you wanted to bring it down
I won't let it go down till we torch it ourselves

Everyone knows I'm in
Over my head
With eight seconds left in overtime
She's on your mind

So, it's official...

Mederma for Kids commercials scare the hell out of me.

I'm in my element, baby...

So, my heart found Christmas...it was wonderful.

As was New Year's. My brother and sister-in-law came down from Indiana and stayed for a week. It was good to relax and spend time with the family. I saw a few movies with the women in the family: The Family Stone and Rumor Has It. I enjoyed both of them. I love seeing movies. I should go to the theater more often...there is something magical about it.

Anyway, I am now focusing on my thesis and wrapping up my time here in Abilene, and more specifically, Hardin-Simmons. I am working on and off as a substitute teacher. It's is kind of exciting because you never know where you will be. I realized today that one could write some of the best short stories ever based off the conversations between a group of middle school girls. It is insane what they talk about. I know I am not that far out of middle school...just about a decade...but things really have changed. People are not making it up. Today I worked at Mann Middle School in athletics. We played tennis...badmitton...that's what I did all day. On Thursday I work at Cooper, teaching debate and theatre arts. That's a little more "up my alley". I am kind of excited about it, and it beats sitting around working on something (my thesis) that I am not getting paid for.

Well, nothing is really going on besides the thesis and the occasional subbing. When school begins at HSU I will have more work coming my way, which will be nice. I am more motivated when I am busy. I would like to be working pretty much all the time and having to squeeze my thesis in. I think I would get more work done that way, when I know I only have a set amount of time to work.

I will write again soon...when I have something blog-worthy to talk about.

I hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year's, and that you got some quality "family time" in.

When my heart finds Christmas...

In my eyes are valentines
and easter eggs and New Year's wine,
but when my heart finds Christmas
my eyes will shine like new.

All the days are kind to me
but fall too far behind to see,
but when my heart finds Christmas
I hope it finds you too.

Let the angels sing around us,
Christmas time is here.
Let the children's love surround us,
laughing and filled with cheer.

My heart told me once before
to find my dream and search no more.
And when my heart finds Christmas,
I hope it finds you too.

Pardon the entry, but I love Billy...

This is for all of you English majors and for the lovers of literature found devouring book after book this Christmas break. You know you all do this, or have (at least) stumbled upon it.

"Marginalia" by Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."