Free dinner, my house, except I'm leaving

Really too bad that I'm leaving now, because I owe all of you a dinner. A while back, this guy e-mailed me trying to get me to promote his sub-par indie rock band, and I posted his e-mail address and told everyone to send him hate mail. So, just recently I got two messages from him, one of which said, among other unprintable things, that I have 24 hours to take his e-mail off this blog. I wanted to see what would happen, so I just left it as it was. True to form, exactly 24 hours later I get 38 e-mails confirming my subscriptions to Christianity Today Online, Discovery.com, and various porn sites. He is a widely-read man indeed.

The term is done, aside from my essays I haven't really started. One on Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse, the other on Basil Bunting's Briggflatts. I really just forgot both how to write essays and how to read poetry in general. It's been so long since I've dissected anything (formally) that I just feel stupid. Not to mention that I'm sick of it and I just want to go off and read some Wallace Stevens or Samuel Beckett or something. On the last flight home, I bought Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah Book Club!) and read about half of it, now I'm maybe 3/4. It's so romantic I can hardly handle it, but a good book, and I like how nothing really happens, it's all memory.

I was having this conversation with Alyssa today, but I really just am looking forward to sitting and doing nothing with people. You really have to know people to just do nothing with them. Here, I get that occasionally going out for a pint after work or class, but that's only the rare week, and it's never quite as casual as it could be. I have got to finish these essays. I mean, start, but also eventually finish.