These days, I feel marginally competent a lot of the time. And then this evening, I check my e-mail and find appended to a student's question a postscript: after class on Friday, J. and I went outside and read the Pater essay out loud to each other, like you suggested. Thanks for the recommendation. And it comes to seem that perhaps things are going better than I fear.

Today's New York Times magazine has a set of articles that have me afraid to put sugar in my coffee tomorrow (or ever), sure that I should stop sitting down so much, and convinced that I should go to bed by 11 p.m. and sleep until 7 a.m. all week, no matter what.

When the power went out this afternoon--wind, don't you know--I was listening to two of my students sing. I didn't even find out that there had been a reason we'd sat in an unlighted concert hall until I got back to my office and found students in the officehouse who'd been kicked out of the library because of the outage. I read about Hopkins (my heart) for a little while and then headed off to discover that the prairie must have been burned last week after all.