I have a Dark Angel in my Bag

Up early to go in early to work in my office before class.

I've been in a funk lately, not getting much work done at my office at home. In particular, my poetry books are split between the two offices, and it always seems like the book I want is in the other place.

Today we're writing poems in my lit class. Elegies. I know: I'm so funny. I seem obsessed with mourning. So the students are supposed to come in today with concrete descriptions someone. And we're going to use the June Jordan guidelines. I'm very very nervous about all this, but I also really need to start pushing myself out of my comfort zone. And so, writing poetry along with the students. That means I need a list.

In my office, the "order" is breaking down. I signify on "order" because the office itself is not in such great shape. it's more than half full of boxes of books and papers (not mine). I'm also guilty in this, and though all my books are on the shelves, the two boxes of papers I haven't figured out what to do with are now--in the immortal words of julien--covered with Colorful Throws!

They would have fit under my desk, but then where would I crawl during an earthquake?

Oh, so back to "the order." I'm talking bookshelves of course. I periodically change my classification system. And since my job move was both disciplinary as well as transcontinental, the old order changeth. Do I put all the books of poetry together? Or do I keep the Chicana poets with the Chicana novelists? (some of them are the same people, after all). Is it better to put Cherríe Moraga's Hungry Woman next to the Reza Abdoh's The Law of Remains? or next to Alma Luz Villanueva's La Llorona and Other Stories? I'm always afraid of appearing like the "certain aphasiacs" described by Foucault in The Order of Things:

It appears that certain aphasiacs, when shown various differently coloured skeins of wool on a table top, are consistently unable to arrange them into any coherent pattern....In one corner, they will place the lightest-coloured skeins, in another the red ones, somewhere else those that are softest in texture, in yet another the longest, or...those that have been wound up into a ball. But no sooner have they been adumbrated than all these groupings dissolve again, for the field of identity that sustains them, however limited it may be, is still too wide not to be unstable; and so the sick mind continues to infinity...

maybe i should knit instead...?

for the sci-fi class, I'm keeping an episode of Dark Angel in reserve, so I can draw upon the brilliant theory of bendypalm and prepare the students for next week's discussion of Tuskegee.