biking today: burning lungs in the cold, slightwind, slats of sun, slats of shade. i passed humbolt park pedalrunning to meet my advisor at the alliance bakery, and putzypedaling home afterwards... some drifting geese, the leaves following their name. and of course, the pleasure of toeclips and stopping at lights, pumping on the go, tapping the pedal and snapping my toes into place. the sensation that happens when you forget you're working, when motion doesn't feel foreign and it's all about something passing and then another passing.

my advisor was chipper today, which made me happy, because she's pretty intense and sometimes i'm resistant to her resistance. trying not to define by the lack of, not always looking for the unknowable or unseeable, since that's just about everything. instead, just sitting in the sun and talking about yepez or selene, having people go to the bakery, the scent of coffee and sugar on my tongue, feeling the rattle of an autumn almost gone. that smell around, no longer decomposition, but waves given off a puddle wanting to feel its body solid.

last night, a halloween party. i went as a "fine arts student"... pinned to my shirt little clippings i'd taken from a wellness center's catalogues, which were inserted into the free newspapers i'd brought home for paper mache. (trying to get the paper mache going again... it's been awhile since i've created of my gooing paws, but i forgot how long the drying project is and my "three personal rings of hell" hat was not even dry for the frescos to be painted onto its surface. trying to decide what my three personal rings are.) but the catalogue clippings were for classes such as the Love Bootcamp 101, Safari Lovemaking, Dating a 10 When You're Not One, Street Flirtation, S & M Bondage, Finding the Xspot, and so forth... it made me laugh that nobody at the party understood why I called myself a "fine arts" student, when i thought the classes spoke to the title pretty well.

i'm trying to decide whether to leave logan square. don't want to bag out on my roommate, don't want to leave the fluffy kitty, don't know what i'm doing this summer.

this week is going to be hard - i have a reading of the "poLITical" piece i posted earlier, which i couldn't get past hating, and so started re-writing from scratch. scared about whether i'll finish. and then there's teaching, which i'm all sad and annoyed about again because the students again turned in a crop of crappy papers, but worse yet, unrevised (in a three-week revision process). art students are selectively lazier than any i've known before. yet another disillusion - i thought they'd be more into the learning process, more willing to throw themselves out there and take risks. so, i've got all these papers to grade and on my first read, i couldn't commit to the idea of passing more than a few of them. good that teaching is in my soul, or i might despair.

gonna carve my pumpkin tomorrow, gonna drink spiced cider, gonna write up a storm tonight, gonna put on ten sweaters and think language, and muse my language to engulf. i want words, i want wordsnew, i want words like the motion of water and leaves and wind and good friends and blankets and biking and goosebumps and broken wineglasses. i want to find myself in the middleof, bereft of adjectivation, able to toesnap the exact point along a running line.