What I Did on my Martin Luther King Jr. Vacation

I have a master plan to stick it to Wal-Mart by shopping the specials at Harris-Teeter. The e-VIC specials are crazy good, like half off and buy-one-get-two-free. I do buy things that aren't on sale if I need them, but the practice dictates my meals somewhat, which in these days of indecisiveness feels kinda nice. So I have a whole lotta chicken in the freezer. I ate tilapia this evening with rosemary (a trick my aunt taught me, so the house smells like rosemary instead of fish), and my go-to salad of spinach, raspberry vinaigrette, walnuts, and feta. A little bowl of cherries, and crackers and cheese. Quite a spread. Oh, and ice cream for dessert. I feel rather queenly when I actually sit down at the island to eat instead of wandering in circles or plopping on the couch.

Job opportunities come in a slow but steady trickle, slow enough that I worry but steady enough that I don't collapse from it. My job-correspondence spreadsheet--whom I've contacted and when--provides the sweet illusion of control. The weather continues to surprise and please us all--I saw two barefoot boys in their bathing suits on the sidewalk today. Student work is shockingly good for in-class exercises but predictably bell-curved on typed assignments. I think it's because they don't think too hard about the in-class stuff. I had them write one sentence and then pass the paper, write the next sentence of the story they then had, etc. One began, "Today I turned 96 years old," and the next student continued, "And it's the first day I've ever been outside." I almost got chills.

I'm workshopping next week, almost all of the book that isn't directly about the set-to. A little nervous because it's so different from what other people turn in for that class. They're all writing novels, fiction novels, and this is not going to be quite so linear. But one of the best things I've learned in grad school is how to hear and interpret responses to my work, so I can certainly handle whatever they say, especially considering that the portion I'm sharing isn't the book's heart. There are surprisingly few things I'll miss about grad school, but I will definitely miss workshop. It's simultaneously so thrilling and so safe.

I learned the most fun game ever last night! It's called telephone pictionary. Everyone gets a stack of note cards, as many as there are people. You write a phrase on one card, any phrase. I used "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Up the creek without a paddle." You pass the entire stack to the right. Then everyone looks at the phrase and draws a picture of it, leaving their picture on the top and moving the phrase to the bottom of the stack. Pass, and then write the phrase you think the picture represents. Pass and draw the phrase, and so on until you run out of cards, which will coincide with your receiving your original stack. Everyone shows all of their cards so you can see how their phrase, in most cases, got mangled beyond recognition. "Napoleon Dynamite" quickly became "swingset," and "Up the creek without a paddle" became "I see a happy fish and I am thrilled." "He drinks too much" became "foul language" because someone drew a guy drinking from a jug with XXX on it but the jug was upside down and looked like a speech bubble with XXX in it. You should definitely play, and everyone can make fun of everyone else's drawings, and you will laugh and laugh and if one of your friends is pregnant she will have to leave a lot to pee because of all the laughing.