I'll be heading up north this afternoon for tomorrow's class and I've got 2,000 niggling chores to accomplish before I leave. I don't know how anyone manages to routinely travel for work. I am really not that good at it.

I spent much of yesterday prepping myself to deliver a complicated lesson on performance: trying to break down all of the steps in doing a grouped staged reading and then stacking them up in a way that might be useful and reasonable for high schoolers. This project was their idea, and I'm all fired up to support them in it, but I'm definitely making stuff up as I go along. Teaching as improv. C'est ma vie.

I'm soothing myself by staring at the fat bouquet of gerbera daisies my friend gave me last night--brilliant orange and green and quite unlike a Maine winter. I feel tempted to carry them along with me, a visual kiss for the middle of our writing table, but I would probably spill flower-water all over the backseat of my car.

Everything's at sixes-and-sevens this morning [which means what? why not "at fours-and-fives"?]: I'm feeding a houseguest, derailing the cat, puzzling over which pair of shoes won't hurt my feet, grinding coffee, answering messages . . . I can barely find a moment to sit on the couch and write this note to you . . . and then, all of a sudden, there will be nothing but time. The strange intersection of busyness and emptiness. How odd it is to be human.