Spread

I rested during crane pose.

I went to yoga class tonight.

That's the sentence I found in this open document when I opened my computer this morning. Clearly, I meant at some point last night to tell you all about it. More clearly, I didn't know what, or I got distracted by cracked.com or bedtime. Ah, but it was really good and exhausting, and anytime I do yoga (which is rarely) what I am most reminded is that yoga is hard. But the teacher (one of my students, actually) was lovely and gentle, so that every time the thought "I am not good at yoga" came into my head, I knew that such thinking was not in the spirit of yoga and gave myself a break.

Mistargeted, kind of.

I won't even let myself go of on the privacy issues involved here, but according to my settings (if you click there, does it take you to your own Google settings?), Google thinks I'm a 25-34-year-old man, interested in brain teasers, cats, San Francisco, and reality TV. A little hit or miss there. Sure, I'm all about the puzzles, and if you post a funny kitten picture on my Facebook, I'll be happy for hours, but I don't google "cats" ever. (Oh, wait, maybe when mine get sprayed by skunks and I forget the best formula to clean them up.) And then I think, what kind of 25-year-old man is interested in brain teasers and cats and The Bachelor? I have never met that guy. Let alone been him.

Did you say snow day?

It's a snow day here, though I keep second-guessing that. It's coming down pretty hard, and they're calling it an "ice-snow" storm, so the cancellation seems legit, but I'm still paranoid it was just a fantasy, a dream I was having when my alarm went off, so I keep checking: the school web page, the text and email I got from school, the local news web page. But I think I've just now gotten to where I believe it already.

Though the school closings have been scrolling across the TV screen since I woke up. But it's one of those days – which happen occasionally – where TV6 has no sound. This keeps throwing me, since I usually have the Today Show on mute anyway, while I'm checking email, following twitter links, until Vicky Crystal comes on with the local news and weather. Because I really don't want to hear the Today Show details about the latest child-tragedy or how to choose the right purse or what house is on the market in Nebraska or what Star Jones has to say about much of anything. So each time I see VC out of the corner of my eye, I grab the remote and click to unmute, but it does nothing. I'll just assume the weather is really all the news there is around here right now.

I've got tomorrow's school day to plan for, but maybe that can wait a bit. So, ooh, which book to go back to bed with?

 

And the horse you rode in on.

So happy to have The Bachelor back on TV. Sure, Monday Night Football fills the gap in my heart sometimes, but at their best Mondays will be The Bachelor + garbage night forever.

Monday night's premiere made it clear what the show's been missing all along: more bisexual bachelorettes. There's simply no incentive for the women *not* to compete for the man. (Or vice versa, when it's the Bachelorette.) If there were potential love interests inside the house while the Bachelor was out hot-air-ballooning with someone else, well, that'd be fun. Really rooting for ponytail girl and the Maxim model to be roommates.

Have to say my favorite moment was Granny wiping away shy tears in the limo on her way home. I swear they just loop a video of that Sarah McLachlan abandoned-pet ad on some hidden TV back there to make sure everybody who gets in wells up.

And if the snow buries my neighborhood, I'll dig a tunnel.

Day two of the new year, and I'm snowed in.

Which, I know, sounds like a perfect opportunity to work on my syllabi for the upcoming term, but I think instead I'm going to lie around and read. Because the non-essential thing most likely to bring me to tears over the course of a semester is how I spend – between teaching and editing -- *so much* of my time reading bad stories. It seriously hurts my heart, how I'm filling myself with crappy sentences on a regular basis. And I know I'm a good teacher, and a good editor, and that these stories and sentences sometimes get better, but the percentage of writing that actually *needs* to get better is very small. The leap from incoherent and uninteresting to clearer but still uninteresting is not a leap that always needs making. So today: Aimee Bender and Kevin Brockmeier. People who never make me reach for a pen when I'm reading them.