people to be thankful for: poach, who is one person i can always talk to about work and school. we were talking about "senioritis" and how our last semesters are developping in different but equally dissatisfactory ways. she said to me that nothing seems terribly motivating and all she really wants is to work on her thesis and yet she doesn't feel she's doing much about it - and that's almost exactly how i feel - that i'd rather be working on the thesis and have lots of time to read and write but there's just so much other trivial you feel but nonetheless there stuff to bog you down. lectures and midterms and discussions and homework like having to turn in response papers. things that sap your energy and time in little bits which is frustrating and not very helpful to your overall needs. we're losing steam, maybe? i wonder how cindy can do 19 credits every semester and still do summer school and semesters abroad and be involved in volunteering and half a dozen other activities and still have time to party. i have a perfectly normal load and yet i seem to be tired all the time - i now wish i didn't have greek and latin on alternate days cos that just seems like endless prep - everyday you're going to class and preparing one or the other for the next day and trying to update your translation for the previous day - there's never any end to it - not to mention the same professor takes me for both classes. when they were on the same days, it was extreme madness for 3 days and then a good long break between. i'm not sure that's healthier either, but it didn't feel so tomorrow tomorrow and tomorrow? and yet the languages are what keeps me interested in school still. poach and i thought this could be because with languages, or with her photography class, that we're progressing towards some final though indefinite aim - that proficiency is what winks at the end. with english literature classes, we're losing interest. not that i don't always enjoy or are interested in literature, or that we don't keep learning new things - i shan't ever stop learning new things i think - but in a sense it's all old hat. different works and authors and ways of reading, but essentially we've been doing this since we're 14. maybe we're plateauing out on our learning curves or something, and with languages and photography we're just beginning. i was in the library yesterday and passing a shelf on which a title called "on becoming a translator" caught my eye and suddenly a sharp sense of grief came over me i thought how can i possibly be away from a university library for so long these are the things that i want to be near - these books - this particular library - the basement "what is literature" books.

this being the way i'm feeling, it was most excellent luck to run into bob reeder in the library, where nohrnberg had sent me to retrieve a number of books for my thesis. i needed to talk to someone badly about my meeting with nohrnberg and milbank yesterday, and also about general anxieties - graduating, lack of progress, school - and bob was the perfect person - always sympathetic and able to put things in perspective, in that older and wiser way - and someone who knows what it's like to write with two advisors and who is such a nohrnberg fan. wish i were more steady and dependable like him! even his name exudes solid ease and dependability - whenever i see an email from him "robert w. reeder" i think, that's a name that belongs on the cover of a book! if my name wasn't a verb maybe i wouldn't be so hasty and blundery and hotheaded and can sit still and have a longer attention span than a pigeon. bob's teaching a shakespeare class with plays i haven't read and i asked if i could sit in on some of them sometimes. i can't think how lucky i was to have a friend like him - i should jolly well think anybody should count themselves lucky to know him! what was that paulo coelho said about the universe conspiring to help what you on your way? my last two years have been favoured with good people - nohrnberg and nolan, vandersee (oh vandersee), and bob reeder. people who've helped me seen the way and been supportive and inspiring and kind and comforting and wise. i've had lots of help from the universe, you can be sure.