Well, here you go.

http://lafleurepuisee.blogspot.com/

It's nice to start fresh.

You can bookmark it, or if you have a google homepage, you can add it there.

Sniff, sniff, sigh.

a few thoughts

1. tonight we had dinner at the home of some really lovely neighborhood friends. this good dinner included mint chocolate chip ice cream in pretty green cups. i think that says it all.

2. on my way from the campus library to said dinner engagement, i passed by the new intramural field. the tall lights were shockingly bright, and i watched a young man in a leather jacket run around with his dog and an orange frisbee. their combined footprints were like expansive free-motion quilting all over the snow.

3. it is so cold, this below-zero temperature, this 30-below wind-chill, that the snow squeaks beneath one's feet and refuses to form into snow balls. from within a coffee shop this afternoon josh and i watched a laughing couple dash and pelt each other with loose handfuls of snow, ducking around strangers walking by on the sidewalk.

4. and finally, i'm wondering who still reads this. my interests are increasingly drawn into pretty non-xanga blogging worlds (as brandi mentioned), and i'm feeling the pull to a new interface. for one thing, much of my silence here in the past few months has resulted from internet glitches that demolish long posts. blogspot automatically saves my drafts, however. i'm also struck by how many of my "subscriptions" are now defunct. the social world seems to have moved to facebook, and those who want to blog, unless they already have an astonishing following (like kim e.) have moved on to prettier, rather more aesthetic places. thoughts? would those of you who still read this be willing to bookmark or RSS me elsewhere?

I'm basking in the afterglow of good friends over for dinner, laughter and conversation and multiple cups of tea and coffee, delicious food, and the promise of another meeting soon. This is one of those nights with a chill in the wind, kept at bay by the valiant hissing radiators. I am glad, glad, glad to be here and alive and faced with good work to do (reading, marking papers in purple ink, typing up annotations).

I am also feeling the pull I have always felt between the ideal and the tactile, the physical and the metaphysical. This business of graduate school has a great deal more to do with abstractions and concepts and knowledge than the pages themselves, the scented ink, the book-cloth and polyvinyl acetate. I wonder how to order my days, to both make books and read the classics, to stitch felt coffee cups and drink the stuff in classes, to grapple with theories and chop carrots and knead bread.

In any case, I think that relationships help negotiate the balance. I think good friends who can make funny, earthy jokes and poke around in one's kitchen cabinets are just the thing.

sweetened tea and the cinnamon candle burning

It's 9:00, and I'm sleepy and antsy. Teaching first thing in the morning is a big change for me: I have to be ready the night before, no lunchtime bouts of inspiration to share later that afternoon. Plus, my students are quite a bit more sleepy at 8:15 than at 2:45. They're an interesting bunch, though; I'm terribly excited to get to know them better.

Today I started The Bluest Eye, attended a prospective professor's grad student interview, and had tea and cookies with a very kind friend. Josh and I are hanging out this evening. We watched Ratatouille and are drinking tea and eating cookies. Soon we will cuddle up in our flannel sheets and sleep until the alarm surprises us out of sleeping.

One of the nice things about being a grown-up is that when one is in the mood for cupcakes with sprinkles, one simply heads to the kitchen and makes cupcakes with sprinkles.