End of the summer

The moon is a pale crescent in a pale sky. Cicadas going crazy in the trees. In this college town it's the last weekend of true summer; classes begin a week from this coming Monday, which means the dorms open this coming Wednesday, which means the whole town is about to change.

Work's been busy, busy; I'm a member of the team that is responsible for the library's website, and we just put up an entirely new site as of yesterday evening. So of course there are lots of problem reports, some ruffled feathers to be soothed, some powerpoint presentations to be made for new student orientation introducing people to the site. I've done a lot of running back and forth (well, emailing back and forth, mostly) between librarians/staff and programmers, doing what can feel at times like translation -- distilling a reported problem into the details the programmers need to diagnose it, then taking what I find out from them & coming back with an explanation in relatively less technical terms. It's fun, actually, but today I was juggling about as fast as I can juggle.

The weekend will be for catching up with neglected things -- poetry, laundry, sleep. And I'll watch more tennis than is really good for me. (Note to self: this has to be the last year you allow yourself to get this distracted by the height of tennis season. Seriously.)

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"What I really want to talk about is my attempt to sell my book of poems, an art form I've been practicing for long enough now that I can't really speak of humiliation memories but rather . . . what? Humiliation loci? Nodules? What I mean is that humiliation turns into an ongoing, inhabited state because writing itself is of this nature. It's the flagrant narcissism that's so humiliating -- writers think their creations are worthy enough to be circulated and admired; they secretly harbor the pride of new parents who are annoying in their ertainty that, out of all the universe forged by procreation, their own child rises above the rabble. Then print serves to cast one's vanity in cement."

--Lucia Perillo, from "Fear of the Market" in I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature