/…….. (<—– Title of This Post Provided by Aiko the Cat)

1. Am simultaneously preparing to leave town for a conference (where I’ll present a paper and give a poetry reading), preparing for my classes tomorrow, setting up course assignments for the subsequent week, commenting on student work, finishing up paper referenced above, and pulling together a grant application. My head’s like a kaleidoscope on hyperdrive — miscellaneous tiles of cyborgs and project narratives and queer theory and fanboys and dada and fuku and zafa and transsexuals and Bhaba and monsters and fetish and word betrayals all clicking and spinning and exploding in manic blooms.

2. Until yesterday, I had forgotten about the deliciousness of dried apricots.

3. Why is it always such a fine fine line for me between being bored and being overstimmed?

4. I think somebody should design a flushable apartment. Where you hit a flush button, and a sonic swoosh comes along and automatically cleans/dusts/vacuums/scours everything clean and funnels it all into some sort of recyclable lint trap thingy. I’m also a big proponent — perhaps I’ve mentioned this before? — of travel via pneumatic tubes, like at the bank’s drive thru. At bare minimum, it would be amusing to send one’s cats back and forth via pneumatic tube delivery system.

5. Last night I dream I have a passel of little brothers. They are, oddly, all towheads. The entire lot of them’s identically garbed in maroon hoodies and blue jeans and tube socks. They’re like a series of towheaded fraternal Russian nesting dolls. I’m staying at a hotel and I want to take a shower, but I can’t because the room’s crammed to the gills with smelly boy stuff — the entire bathroom and bathtub overflowing with dirty wet towels. I pull out some of towels from the bathtub and find a boy’s foot in the bathtub. It’s pale white and squishy and waterlogged, and vaguely fungus-y. “Clean up those towels!” I scold one of my towheaded brothers. He takes out the towels, but leaves the foot in the bathtub. “Will you get that foot out of the bathtub?” I say. “Is that your foot?” He shakes his head no — it belongs to one of the other brothers — and tosses the foot in the bathroom wastebasket. “Hey, you can’t leave that foot there,” I tell him. “Don’t you know that’s medical waste?”

6. Sandias, Old Town adobe, and King Sushi on my event horizon.

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TIDDLIES OF WINK (STILL ON THE (LATE-NIGHT) FLY)

1. So, I’ve gone entirely paperless this semester. As in no paper. Pay. Per. Less. Am trying to save paper. Am hoping to save time, once I get over the initial learning curve and have a set of QuickMarks and a comments library to draw upon. [Delusional] Am hoping to grade on the plane and in airports and at the hotel once the traveling starts up again. [/Delusional] Am interested in the possibilities of grading anytime/anywhere on the Netbook with 3G. By the river in the spring, for example? At the top of the Mulberry Bend overlook? On the moon?

2. Open Letter to Brat Cats (With Names that May or May Not Sound Like Shmaiko?! and Shnobu?!) Who, in the Middle of the Night, Pulled Out all of the Painstakingly-Placed Color-Coded Post-It Flags out of Novel I Was Preparing to Teach this Week: YOU SUCK!

3. Last night I dreamed someone sent me a gigantic gift box, delivered to me at an outdoor cafe. The box was Tiffany blue, and looked like it could hold frighteningly oversized roses. I pulled off the top and lifted away the tissue. Inside, there was a large skinned flank of cow, and a skinned cow’s head. Gosh!, I said.

4. Somehow I thought I had more Tiddlies. I think I’m kind of scraping the bottom of the Wink barrel here?

5. This summer I’m going to read my internment monologues at the Heart Mountain site. I don’t know what else to say about this, other than that I’m very moved. And humbled.

6. I’ll be doing the above reading as part of the Wyoming Writers’ Conference, which will be held in Cody, Wyoming this summer. I’m going to make it a long driving trip, and then afterwards, I’m going to go to Yellowstone! And I will take as many pictures as I want! Also? I’m going to apply to be considered for a thing in Alaska! Because what could be better than that?

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BITS OF TID (ON THE FLY)

1. I’ve been thinking a lot about Waiting for The Next Thing vs. Shaking Things Up and Making Stuff Happen. So many things are out of one’s control and can’t be forced, aside from a certain attentiveness, or trust in process, or openness to possibility. But that said, what are the things that one can feasibly make happen or at least consciously make manifest as a possible happening? Applying for a grant to do a self-directed literary residency at a certain centre you’ve been dreaming of going to? Participating in an artist’s exchange program in, say, Japan? Enrolling for a photography course? Do. Able.

2. I love the velvety feel of Moleskine pages between my thumb and forefinger.

3. Double-header of novels today in my classes: Preeta Samarasan’s Evening is the Whole Day and James Baldwin’s Another Country. It’s going to be an exciting teaching day, but I feel as if my head’s a too-full bucket threatening to slosh over at any second. Overzealous overcaffeination is probably not helping in this regard.

4. I read the Neil Gaiman/Yoshitaka Amano collaboration The Sandman: The Dream Hunters over the weekend. Lovely. I can’t believe I didn’t get around to reading this sooner!

5. Is it weird that I think the word “hegemony” sounds sort of like a velvety-textured black flower with bright red pollen?

6. Two weekends ago? I made my very own soup stock for the very first time. Ever.

7. I only have four more minutes to generate Bits of Tid. It’s only 1 degree outside, and I need to factor in the amount it takes the not-inconsiderable amount of hair on my head to dry completely in order to avoid Flash-Frozen Coif Head.

8. Is it just me, or is the iTunes Genius Mix thingy indeed really sort of genius-y?

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