clothespin

I'm reading Simone Weil again for class.

I don't like the rye bread we have. I don't like rye bread in general. But once in a while I like a piece. The seeds are hard to digest.

If I cry every day, does it mean I'm sensitive, or falling apart?

I'm smirking and my students are smirking as I hand back their papers. Either they think they're getting a good grade, or, like me, they are ashamed of the process of grading, assigning value in abstract form. They see its absurdity. And they see the impossibility of my posture as teacher.

My 591 prof turned to me after class today and said, "Hi," like I had not been sitting next to her the entire class. It made me feel so good I wanted to cry.

If Simone is right, then grad school is an exercise in futility, because the goal is compensation. Compensation fills the void, thus disallowing grace to penetrate. But if I realize it is futile, do I not then enter another void?

The haircut...When she's kneading the shampoo in I lower my eyes but do not close them, so I don't give away how much I am enjoying it.

"When you emerge from the desert, your eyes go on trying to create emptiness all around; in every inhabited area, every landscape they see desert beneath, like a watermark. I takes a long time to get back to a normal vision of things and you never succeed completely. Take this substance from my sight!" -Jean Baudrillard's America

The desert for Baudrillard represents absence, how American culture has become a facsimile of itself. What's real is what we make real. We created the airy confidence that reigned during the Reagan era, we fabricated the images of the desert West in cinema, and these are more real than reality.

The sky was amazingly clear today, a rare day in Ohio when the canopy opens, and I see a slice of blue that approximates the desert. But what desert am I longing for? The one I have created in my mind, the absence of space.

I walked down Court Street and was blinded by the sun. It was a white glare, not the fiery yellow of the southwest. The color makes no difference; I could not see.