that different components of the application are mailed and/or emailed to three different places within the university.

for a month, tomorrow. First to the North, then to the South, then to the MLA, then back to Baltimore for another installment of the intersession course on musicals. But first: a month (a month!) in Cali.

Plane reading: "Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett" by James Knowlson. And a semester full of physics labs that need to be proofread. And a checked bag full of student portfolios. And several applications. Whoever said you’re not supposed to take work on vacations never met me. Still, hoping to catch up with friends, and get some down time before the return to teaching and the final semester of the MFA (and its incumbent Madness of Thesis.) I am looking forward to this trip very much.

Now if only this whole "packing" thing were as easy to do while sleeping as blogging is…

"On this day, the day he was assassinated, what I remember is the night we both cracked up drinking tea.

They say teenagers laugh at the drop of a hat. Nowadays I see many teenagers sad and angry with each other. John and I were hardly teenagers. But my memory of us is that we were a couple who laughed."

– Yoko Ono, "The Tea Maker," NYT,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/opinion/08ono.html?_r=1

"Unlike the cryptic social and professional mazes of real life, puzzles are reassuringly soluble; but like any serious problem, they require more than mere intellect to crack.

“It’s imagination, it’s inference, it’s guessing; and much of it is happening subconsciously,” said Marcel Danesi, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and the author of “The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life.”

“It’s all about you, using your own mind, without any method or schema, to restore order from chaos,” Dr. Danesi said. “And once you have, you can sit back and say, ‘Hey, the rest of my life may be a disaster, but at least I have a solution.’ ” "

– NYT, "Searching the Brain for the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving," (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/science/07brain.html?src=me&ref=general)

…when we say that many things are, approximately, springs? Well, as you learned (or will learn) in Calculus II, any function in the neighborhood of a point can be approximated by a Taylor series. The same is true for a force: a force is just a function, typically of coordinates. The first term of interest in a Taylor expansion is the linear term. Any system with a force linear in displacement behaves like a spring. This is why many things can be approximated by springs."

…to a first approximation, springs."

the prospect of the West Coast fills me with overwhelming joy.