I recently picked up my dusty copy of Walden, and found some passages that I had underlined. There is so much wisdom in this book, I should refer back to it regularly, or at least start leaving it next to Gideon's Bible in motel rooms:

"This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once. "What!" exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?" Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt."

"The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves...It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages."

"It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow."

"I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breath malaria all the way."

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swatch and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

-Henry David Thoreau

vino vino!

i read my last post and realized i sound like an alcoholic. truly, i only drink a few glasses of red wine a week. but wine consumption was up this weekend by several notches...as SuperDork and i spent two evenings at two different swanky wine bars in Austin. now we have this sort of distant dream of opening our own coffee shop/ wine bar one day. a very abstract sort of dream. but given that we met at a coffee shop, our first date was at a coffee shop, and that we buy coffee in bulk, its a very fitting dream.

in other news... valentines day was low-key: fonda san miguel for dinner and then mt. bonnell to gaze upon the well-lit mansions of austin's rich... who, by the way dont pay property taxes because their homes sit on lake austin. thats the rumor anyways. the outrage! i need to add that to my list of causes.

we have transitioned from chaucer to shakespeare in my class, and last night i was up past 1 am trying to read "two noble kingsmen." and today i have to figure out how to create charts and graphs to track regional variations in corpus linguistics. YEAH, that will be real helpful knowledge when im a teacher.

watched "the big sleep" for the 3rd or 4th time this weekend. ran around town lake. went to sister in law's for hamburgers. finished a lesson plan on "point of view" using the book "wicked." reconnected with friends in NM and revived longstanding debate at home on whether we should move to the wild desert!

thats all for now.

ciao!

ah, its been awhile.

life is so hectic right now, i hardly have time to write. last week i was so stressed out that i got some weird spasm of my eye. yes, mine eye! i thought i was going to walk around with a twitching eye the rest of my life like someone with tourette syndrome. but then i drank wine, fell asleep, and it stopped.

my semester is a combination of thrill and misery. the thrill of course is being back in an academic setting, reading chaucer in middle english (which i LOVE) and just learning in general. the misery is speed walking from my class to my car, eating a sandwich with my left hand while i drive with my right hand to work (watch out, pedestrians, you fools!). then sprinting to my office door. i dont know why at this point i am so determined to try to do both...i suppose i still get some sort of satisfaction out of my job. i got an article published in an academic journal this year, and i finished a chapter with my colleagues which will be published in a book next year. i suppose these are good things, and its hard to walk away from.

whatever social life i had now seems nonexistent. i spend friday nights learning about Subject Predicatives. i spend saturday nights writing lesson plans. soon spring is coming and im going to be really depressed if im not out biking on beautiful saturday afternoons. alas.

superdork and i went to a gala/ fundraiser this weekend. i had several mishaps involving my dress. i forgot my tolerance was low (due to lack of recent social life) and drank one too many glasses of red wine. there was an auction and we bid on a sushi dinner at a uchi, which i hope we won, because i could use a good dose of sake toro and hotate right now. even if it is at austin's most chichi restaurant where everyone is confused and thinks South Lamar is Hollywood Boulevard.

what else? oh, our summer vacation is set for the coast of maine, including possibly acadia national park. perhaps the most beautiful place on earth.

must get back to reading chaucer. who, by the way, had a sick, sick mind! if right-wing fundamentalists only read more, the canterbury tales would certainly surpass harry potter as the most banned book in texas schools!