just like riding a bicycle, right?

It's been so long since I posted that I'm feeling a little intimidated by sitting here in front of a blank screen. But I'm by myself in a hotel room, and I purposely didn't bring a book to read so that I would have to study, so I don't have anything else to do. But I don't want to study. So this is a good excuse, right? Usually I love staying in a hotel room by myself. It feels so decadent-- a whole room to myself, all clean and shiny, and I don't have to make the bed or do any laundry or feel compelled to do any of the dozens of things I feel guilty about not doing when I'm at home. But for some reason, it's not quite working tonight. I'm feeling a bit blue and lonely and wishing someone else was here. And I really, really don't want to work on the paper I should be working on.

So I've got my i-Pod plugged in and I'm listening to mellow music and thinking of all the things I've halfway wanted to blog about in the past couple of months but just never quite got around to posting. I know I have two new readers this week, so I'll say one thing that I've been meaning to say: please don't subscribe to this blog. Not because I don't want anyone to read it, but because of my really nasty habit of editing posts over and over again, sometimes a dozen times or more. If you subscribe, you'll get each and every version of each and every post--and sometimes it's just a matter of fixing typos or re-wording a sentence. Yuck. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, especially not someone who is kind enough to want to read my blog.

So... let's see, what else. I guess there is something I could get out of the way and that is to fill in the background of what's been going on since school started. (start up cheesy elevator music and cue voice-over: "When last we saw our plucky heroine...."). Well, OK, I'm not plucky. but anyway. So you knew I was headed back to school. They still haven't admitted me to grad school, but they're letting me take a couple of classes, I think just because I was so obnoxious that they didn't know how else to get rid of me. But by the time I got all that worked out, the classes that I wanted to take were full. So I ended up taking two classes that I would never have dreamed of taking otherwise: "Dante" (yup, the 14th century Italian guy), and "The Bible as Literature." Can you believe it? But I have to admit, they are both fascinating, with interesting professors whom I like very much. And even better, they are fascinating to take together. The overlap is amazing, and sometimes a little eerie. For example. In the Dante class, we started the semester reading 13th century Provencal and Italian troubadour love poetry. Today, the Bible as Lit prof went off on a digression about 13C Italian love poetry and its influence on the Western idea of romantic love. Another time they both talked about Zoroastrianism on the same day.  So I'm happy. It has been a great experience, except for writing papers, which I always hated and probably always will. Let me just say for the record, though, that when you haven't written a paper in 25 years and you were and are a bit of a perfectionist about them, it is not a pretty picture. If you haven't done it, I don't think it's possible to describe how absolutely terrifying it is to turn in a paper when you haven't written one in more than two decades.

OK, so now I'm caught up, I think, so maybe now I will start posting again and maybe the next one will be more interesting. Because (of course) both these classes have brought up lots of things to think about. The lack of posts has definitely not been due to a lack of things to post about!

AB