I'll be hitting the road again today--first visiting homeland friends, then teaching all day tomorrow. Omens are good: the weather is innocuous, my class plans are filled with surprises, and I get to spend time with my dear ones. But perhaps omens were good for Kobe Bryant's family too. And then they weren't.

I've been rereading Johnson's biography of Dickens and, concurrently, Dickens's own Pickwick Papers. As a child, I did not immerse myself in this one often as I did his others: my mother's copy was so battered that it was hard to squirrel away in a blanket fort or up in my favorite tree. But I'm really enjoying it now. Such a bright, laughing book, set in a kind of fairy-tale-shopkeeper England, where all of the jokes are obvious yet in the moment they are still the funniest thing I've ever read.

So I'm simultaneously floating in Dickensian lunacy, and echoing the pang of other people's loss, and grinding my teeth over the loathsome Republican Party, and worrying about my beloveds, and sometimes I wonder how such everyday emotional maelstroms are even possible to survive.