Yesterday's reading was such a pleasure. People came! The room was full! It was very sweet to read with Gibson and Mike, very sweet to have the chance to try out new poems in the air in front of such an engaged audience. And when I got home Tom was busily making homemade ravioli, so all I had to do was lounge by the fire and wait to be fed a delicious meal. Such luxury.

I didn't watch football last night, but I did watch the halftime show, and Bad Bunny was excellent. I loved the working-class emphasis--people doing their jobs, people enjoying their pleasures. I loved the sugarcane field, the flags of all the Americas. I loved the sound of Spanish washing over me. Of course I was already a Bad Bunny fan: his music is often playing in this house. Yes, I like his music for its own sake, but also I like being in the position of not speaking a language; to hear and to wonder; to let cadence, not meaning, take control of the body. We monolinguists owe it to ourselves, and to everyone else, to swim in the seas of mystery.

This afternoon I'll be driving north, so this morning I'll be scrabbling to catch up on desk work. I'm almost but not quite done with the giant editing stack, but my teaching schedule is throwing a wrench into my editing schedule, meaning that I probably won't quite make the deadline. Ah, well.

Naturally the cold continues, and more snow is on the way, though I should get home tomorrow before it starts in earnest. Winter is still digging its claws into us.