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This is the time of the school year when I do a little flutter kick, make a feeble attempt at keeping my head above water. In my high school swim team days, we used to paddle out to the deep end, hold our flat palms shoulder-height and kicked to keep afloat. This, my friends, is precisely how the last two weeks of the semester feel: today I picked up a heavy stack of research essays to grade and did a limping-along presentation on zuihitsu. Tomorrow I grade, I make phone calls for various medical procedures (I have an HSG in my future; Penelope needs to see a surgeon; Ryan even has a doctor's appointment I apparently will have to make), submit my chapbook to a few presses whose deadlines are fast approaching, consider a final paper, work on putting together a first rough draft of that vague thesis... And breathe in, and breathe out.

I signed up for autumn classes: thesis credits with Trish, thesis seminar, workshop, and a class in the Classical & Near Eastern Studies department on the classical epic in translation, which should fulfill my "related fields" requirement. It's certainly an overload, but my final semester would be incredibly smooth sailing. The coursework and teaching (intro to poetry) will be spread over the five days of the week, with only one extra-long campus day.

In honor of the zuihitsu, but in a more blog-conscious format:

On my bedside table: Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
Just finishing watching: Carnivale (season 2, disc 5)
Blooming in our yard: a single red tulip, the zestar apple tree, our two crabapple trees
Listening to on my commute: The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
Which makes me want to re-read: "Leda and the Swan" (see below)