I’m sorry for the brief hiatus; I had a major hard drive meltdown, and I’m still in the process of getting my virtual legs back under me.  As it turns out, posting from my office at CMU is not quite the same thing as posting at my “leisure” at home.  Accordingly, though I technically blogged mid-week, I will not vouch for your user experience.  I cannot be held responsible for anything I’ve said whilst hopped up on pilfered gummi worms. 

Last night I mustered the mojomentum to sit in on the debut reading of Robert Fanning’s American Prophet.  You can buy it over here, but I would only do so if you wish to be universally admired for your taste and good breeding.  I’ve had a longish week (by which I mean “horrifically long and generally traumatic”), and I suffered from a Punxsutawney Faceplant (a special form of Wandlessian narcolepsy) a couple of hours before the reading.  Natheless, I’m glad that I went, both for the sake of the reading itself and my own cranial convolutions.

Although I’m nowhere near completing the project, merely conceiving of a timeline for rounding out a polished collection of poems sapped some of my ideational energy.  I tend to be freakishly forward-thinking (why plan for tomorrow when I can plan for 2012?), and knowing how I’m going to spend much of 2009 emptied my future of one of its principal inhabitants.  Last night, however, my squash played one of its wiggedy associative tricks:  as I listened to Robert read, the framework for my second collection came into view. 

I don’t think that’s so much putting the cart before the horse as buying a second cart before the first horse has grown big enough to draught, but I’ve never been fond of equestrian metaphors.  In any case, I now have an object to write toward, one that will carry me beyond the short term into the murky unknown.   I have a healthy attitude about murk; it’s really quite slimming.

Oddly enough, with such an object in view I now feel better equipped to tackle the obligations of what appears to be an overstuffed weekend.  Let’s just hope I don’t have another epiphany until I have this batch of exams graded.

Fun fact:  I once showed Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls how to do kneeling cable crunches.  I am, as it turns out, pretty darned important.

The purloined title aside, however, this post has precious little to do with the Indigo Girls and much to do with Thoreau.  Just when you think I’m going to snack, I snicker.

I’m writing from my campus computer, as my home computer is down in the basement with the IT peeps.   Last evening was a little disorienting–instead of doing research or responding to e-mail, I watched reruns of Bones and read a little Billy Collins–and I expect more of the same for the weekend.  I’m not a technological whiz-kid, but I spend more than the usual human allotment of living time online.   It’s not uncommon for me to have more than one project up and running on the monitor, and while I’ve somehow lost my ability to slip readily between writing modes, I can still put together a lecture, pen a letter of recommendation, post materials to Blackboard, and hammer out a few iambs au même temps.  I mix in a little unscheduled idle time during the day, and by 7:00pm my eyeballs are ready to retire.

Tragic though it may seem to those unversed in Wandlessian ways, this computer-free weekend might turn out to be my only “vacation” this year.  My plan to focus on a single academic project and a single creative project over the summer is already on uncertain footing (it’s beginning to look more like a 3/2 split, barring some unforeseen diversion or cognitive collapse), and my February and March are already packed pretty densely.  Assuming that my end-o’-the-semester commitments thicken typically, I think I can expect a reasonably long haul until August and beyond.

But here’s the punch line:  I neither want nor need a vacation right now.  All my gears are spinning as they should, and I know full well that my life is only as complicated as I want it to be.  My current plans amount to little more than a concession to momentum, and I can change my pace or direction at any time.  When my inner Thoreau tells me to simplify, this is what my life looks like.  Forcing myself to think or work differently tends to be a kind of complication in its own right.

In many ways I reckon that’s the hard part:  accepting what a life looks like when it assumes a shape you were never taught to expect.  I’ve got plenty of room in mine–for people, for work, for the things that fill and lift me–but the fullness of time suits me well.

Today I’ll begin by getting my geek on.  This presupposes that I sometimes take my geek off, which is obviously a figurative manufacture, but bear with me.  We won’t get very far if you keep on quibbling.

I play fantasy football, a game of very sober make-believe in which adults contend by picking real football players and battering one another with their statistics.  The better the performance–more yardage, more catches, more touchdowns–the better the statistics, which makes for the kind of manifest mathematics that the linguistically inclined can enjoy.

Early in the make-believe season I was faced with a complex make-believe decision:  I could trade Fast Willie Parker (a wounded Steeler) for Marques Colston (a wounded Saint), or I could trade Steve Slaton (a healthy Texan) for Andre Johnson (another healthy Texan).   These are the sorts of make-believe quandaries the avid fantasy footballer faces.  Enchanted by the prospect of having Slaton on my team for two more seasons, I held on to him and made the trade for Colston.  Andre Johnson, the fellow I passed over, subsequently went on a tear, notching five of the finest games wide receivers would record all season.

Colston, who had injured his thumb, rounded back into form slowly, but I have to admit that I picked him for the least calculated of reasons:  I wanted to see him do well.  I used that rationale for much of my season, picking players based on nostalgia (like Santana Moss, who’d been on my team during his crazy breakout season in 2005), or nice feature articles (like Matt Forte, who’s a nose-to-the grindstone personality), or really optimistic team photos (like Dallas Clark, the sole smiling face among the Cro-Magnon tight ends).  I even picked up Tom Brady, a quarterback on injured reserve, for good luck.  To make an already-long story somewhat shorter, the players I picked (Colston and Clark especially) showed up just when I needed them most, and I won the championship in our merry little league. 

What’s more to the purpose, however, is that I did not torment myself with regret for the poor choices I made in prior weeks.  When Johnson had a fantastic game, I had a good laugh.  In previous seasons I would track my decisions almost obsessively:  in the swap I describe above, for example, I would not only track Colston’s performance but Johnson’s and Parker’s as well, gnashing my teeth and beating my breast every time one of them had a stellar day.  Colston’s play had the only material impact on my team, but I dwelled overmuch on alternatives, those sins of omission and comission that theoretically (and ironically more often than not) cost me imaginary victories.  As you might expect, what was true in the Land of Make-Believe was also true in my wiggedy world as well. 

With the advantage of retrospect, I know that such thinking is misguided if not altogether erroneous (in a very Blakeian way).  Back in the day, however, it dominated my thought process, and it’s a terribly hard habit to shake.  I think playing the cards we’ve got rather than the cards we wish we had been dealt is one of the necessary thresholds we’ve all got to cross.

I’ve been reading the blogs of friends and colleagues this morning, and something like a pattern has emerged:  a surrender to What Is, which also involves relinquishing an infinite list of What Might Have Beens.  One friend has looked back at relationships forsaken and determined that she’s much better off as a singleton; another has surrendered to the impulse to write differently, even though it involves turning away from the writing she feels she ought to be doing; yet another has taken stock of his educational and professional choices and found contentment in those he made without too many pangs for those he didn’t.  It takes some time, distance, and lucidity to achieve such realizations, and it can take even more energy to sustain them when faced with a world crosscut with the lines of parallel lives. 

Recently I’ve been trying to shrug off some of the weight I’ve carried, burdens of convention,  projection, and expectation.  Could things have played out differently?  Sure and begorrah.  When it’s approached in the right spirit, it can actually be quite entertaining to envision the lives we might have led had we only taken different forks in the road.  What’s tougher, however, is looking back at doors we’ve closed based on sound advice and kindly counsel.  Making a smart call for all the right reasons is no guarantor of future satisfaction.

Were this a festival of real amor fati, I would look you straight in the monitor and tell you that I wouldn’t change a thing.  That would, however, be one of my filthier lies.  What I can say, however, is that I’m not going to apologize for my approach to criticism (which some kindly folks have frowned upon), my return to verse (which some kindly folks have actively discouraged), or my turn to speculative fiction (which even more kindly folks have dissuaded me from attempting).  I’ve done many awful things and made many rotten choices, but those will never number among them.

So in the spirit of the holiday season, best wishes to you and the things you do, whatever they may be.  Things might have gone differently, and they might have even gone better, but give your things a little credit for going as they should.

Have I dropped a little Beckett on you?  Oh yes, it seems I have.

Today will involve advanced tricksiness, as I’ve still got to find some magical way to systematize thirteen very different essay exams.  I’ve managed to put two classes to bed for ‘08, so I have a bit of leisure to dwell on the matter.  At the moment I am accordingly dwellin’ like a felon, and presumably I’ll find some way to sort it out during tomorrow morning’s read-through.   11th-hour statistical epiphanies are my specialty.

After that, endingness.  I’d have a hard time drumming up two thoughts to rub together right now, so I may need to lapse into offseason mode sooner rather than later.  I wouldn’t characterize the past semester as an especially stressful one (the skool biz actually passed with unprecedented speed), but my noggin’s been sodden for the past month or so.  The ol’ squash remains unduly generative, mind you–whilst proctoring exams, I covered two notebook pages with sketches and snapshots and outlines of poems and stories–but execution?  Well, that’s another matter.

I don’t see the point in blogging at length about the stuff that’s weighing on my mind.  We’ve been down that road twice or thrice before.  Besides, I know folks heading to MLA, folks applying to grad school, and folks with tenure and promotion decisions pending who have much better reasons to be stressed out than me.  Ergo, I reckon I should be devoting my thoughts to prospection rather than retrospection or introspection.  Lord knows I’ve mucked around in my skull more than enough this fall.

In the short term I’ve got courses to plot, which should make for some quality mayhem.  I also may wind up returning to poetry sooner rather than later, since I feel as though I’d best pluck a few ideas before they become overripe.  I’ve still got 33 outstanding submission packets out there in circulation, so I think it’s high time to put some new verse in the hopper.  The spring submission scrum is drawing nigh, and a few publishers offered me extremely kind and encouraging words to close out the fall.  Let’s hope I can live up to that kindness.

The holidays are rough on me, however, because they leave me with an inordinate amount of time to fill.  Most folks would thrive under similar circumstances–or would at least vegetate like champeens–but I require a modicum of structure to make my days pass by.  I’ve got the next week roughly scripted, but after that I enter a great Abyss of Self-Determination.  If I don’t have a plan in place by then, I’ll founder like a $14 rowboat. 

In the short term, at least, I’ll allow myself to bask in yet another semester of gainful employment and the knowledge that I probably didn’t ruin too many young lives with book-larnin’.

Then I think I’ll need to get to gettin’ whilst the gettin’s good.

Today:  fun!  Arterial spray in the trees, gobbets of flesh flung hither and yon, and all the feral fixins you’d expect on a very Bald Man holiday.

Have I mentioned that I’m writing a story about the loup-garou?  That would probably be a useful prefatory note.

Lest ye get whiplash from the transition from the prior post to this one, I should also mention that I’ve received no news from the homestead regarding my mother’s health in the past two days.  Monday involved a twiddling of thumbs–the doctors cannot assess the damage done while she’s in this precarious state, but as the week began she was neither worse nor better–and since then I’ve been out of the loop.  Because I am wired improperly yet extremely well insulated, the silence has allowed me to reroute my systems to work around the anxiety.  When there’s nothing I can do I tend to lapse into inexorable forward motion, but sometimes it takes me a little bit longer to get there.  By my reckoning, forging ahead is much better than sitting in my office and staring at the phone.

As a result, today feels more or less like a typical holiday, although it’s worth noting that typical holidays for me are a lot like Sundays–remarkable only because some stores are closed.  (Starbucks, by the grace of Ba’al-A’zul, the lord of corporate America, remains open.)  Truth be told, I haven’t really celebrated a holiday since 2003.  I don’t have much contact with my family of birth, and my family of choice is scattered all over these United States.  Since holidays are family affairs (at least according to my definition, which is binding), I refuse to be the stranger at someone else’s table.  I’m awkward enough as it is, even among those folks who find my eccentricities endearing.  All three of them.

What will I do today?  Laundry, mostly, and some cleaning.  For Thanksgiving dinner I’ll be having burritos and Mountain Dew, and for supper I’ll have soup.  I’ll watch some football on the ticker, chip away at my werewolf story, grade a few essays, answer a few student e-mails, and gussy up my MySpace page if I have the time.  By six o’clock I’ll be reading Stephen King’s Night Shift and chillaxin’ in the living room.  On tonight’s docket:  thinking about recreation for the coming month-long winter break.  That kind of planning tends to go down easy.

I’ve got a lot to be grateful for.  I’ve got fantastic friends, some dandy colleagues, and a cavalcade of nifty students; I’ve got a swell job, good health, and a limber mind; I’ve got a warm apartment, a full fridge, and clean socks.  As it turns out, it doesn’t suck to be me all that much.  There are some things I might change, but how I might change them is not beyond my ken.

So Happy Thanksgiving to you’n and your’n.  I hope you feel as fortunate as I do.

In theory I should be writing an article about Charlotte Smith; in theory I should be offering academic job hunters recommendations for rejiggering their CVs; in theory I should be finishing up a short story I’m preparing for the Realms of Fantasy 2009 Halloween issue.

Instead I have been shackled to the keyboard, performing the merriest of chores:  writing and mailing withdrawal notices to publishers of poetry.

Since Halloween, for reasons I will have to analyze at a later date, seven of my poems have been accepted for publication and sent to happy homes.  To double up on the happy, all seven of the poems are the products of recent revision, my late-summer attempt to refashion the sound and sense of verse I felt could be executed more perfectly.  At the time it felt like an enormously risky enterprise, as it obliged me to get out of my own way and concede to the aesthetic impulses that drive my style and sensibilities.  Let’s hope I can remember how to do that when next I revisit the drawing board.

My apologies to all those editors who’ve had to put up with the barrage of withdrawals, and my thanks to those who’ve offered me kind words and encouragement in the past several days.  I don’t think my November could get off to a much better start.

But I might buy a lottery ticket, just in case.

Today I’m taking a cue from Full-Grown Single, more particularly the recent (October 10) post on Desulforudis audaxviator, which is only the coolest critter ever.  Hunkered down about two miles below the earth’s surface, snacking on uranium decay, ol’ Dax (as I like to call him) minds his own beeswax, interested in nothing but his own ineffable Daxness.  We could all learn a thing or two from Dax, although I would not take his advice on sunscreen.

Of late, as you could probably tell, my focus has of necessity become excessively extrinsic.  Between our local labor strife, the impending nuptials of an ex-girlfriend, and my desire to help a few friends who are wading through their own train wreckage, I’ve allowed my energies and attentions to become much more diffuse than usual–so much so that I’ve had to pluralize both.  We’re talking about some serious diffusion, people.  On the face of it, this is not what I would deem a Bad Thing; I fancy that my involvement has been of use once or twice (it certainly hasn’t damaged anything, which is a novelty), and I think it’s healthy to promote the illusion that I have some degree of interest in the world beyond my skull.  Inside said skull, however, is where I hold my happy hostage, so I spend a lot of time up there just chillaxin’, snacking on uranium decay, and mucking around in the eaves.

***Time lapse – seven hours later***

Normally a seven-hour hiatus would betoken doom, but I think we can chalk this one up in the “win” column.  I had planned to run to campus at 11:00 today to run interference for a colleague who had an uncomfortable encounter in the offing, but shortly beforehand a friend called up to ask for help with a minor laptop disaster.  That turned into a pleasant secondary excursion when the dread encounter failed to materialize–even my feeble computer ninjutsu is good enough to find a bajillion spyware incursions, which gave us time to chill for a little bit–and then I figured I’d just head into campus to prepare for next week’s classes.  While there, I got that merriest of surprises:  an actual acceptance letter.  Since about 99% of all returned SASEs contain rejection slips, that was a dandy way to end the week.  It also doesn’t hurt that on Wednesday, when the stress of our ongoing labor talks was about to peak, I received two positive electronic notices as well.  I’ll have a lot of bookkeeping to manage tomorrow, but that’s a problem I can live with.

I have nary a prayer of recapturing my morning mood, so I’ll leave off for the time being.  If you’re so disposed, have a Dax-tastic weekend.

This is how I rope in the Suzanne Vega fans.  They are, as you know, a key demographic.

Many moons ago I went to a dentist to have a filling replaced.  She saw me on short notice, proved to be quite nice, and explained clearly her rationale for going with a simple fix that could always yield to the complex fix if needed.  Happy to have the matter handled, I debit carded my co-pay on the way out the door and added the dentist’s name to list of Mighty Fine Reasons to Be Happy with Mount Pleasant.  Two months later I received a Final Billing Notice, filthy with angry red ink.  According to said notice, I was days away from being referred to collections; I had received three prior notices, the form insisted, and if I was not going to fork over six dollars and change they would sic the dogs on me.  When I called to inquire about this imminent threat, the billing agent suggested that I wouldn’t be in this pickle had I not been so negligent.  I in turn suggested that I might have liked one of those first three notices.

I quite like that dentist, but I’ll never go back.

Back when I blogged anonymously I chipped away at a 114-part series entitled “Why I am still single.”  It was intended as a diversion for my friends, and it consisted of a cavalcade of my faults, foibles, and idiosyncrasies.  (In retrospect, 114 strikes me as a laughably low estimate.)  It was modeled loosely after Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, because I figure that whimsy ought to be celebrated as a form of self-expression.  At bottom, I don’t think I’m much more unreasonable than anyone else.  When it comes to the vagaries of dating and relationships, however, I observe a few peculiar policies that contribute to my standing solitude.  Some folks might think them unreasonable.

As the example of my former dentist suggests, I don’t believe in second chances. 

When it comes to relationships, I have never been one to deserve or receive second chances.  This has been something of a double-edged sword, and part of this phenomenon is clearly of my own making.  On the one hand, the most perverse dogmatism I might muster in my dealings with the cosmos runs just about parallel to the perverse dogmatism my dating career has met with.  One girlfriend broke up with me for cheating on her, for example, and she persisted in her resolution even though about thirty disinterested parties could attest to my very public whereabouts on the night said cheating allegedly occurred.  Another kicked me to the curb for failing to earn my third-date merit badge, an implicit set of proofs that I, insensitive boor that I am, was far too dense to realize were in effect.  As it turns out, I don’t generally engage in those behaviors that normally warrant the second-chance relational mulligan:  I never cheat, I keep my word, I remember toes I ought not step on.  The dearth of second chances in my dating career, then, either points toward arbitrariness equal to my own on the part of my square dance partners or else masks underlying causes of which I could not be aware (i.e., they needed to let me go for other reasons and used matters of personal policy as an excuse). 

On the other hand, alas, I lack the semiotic sophistication to recognize when these rejections are not matters of personal policy but instead ploys or performances.  From time to time I’ll be involved in relational flare-ups, ones that, poor benighted chump that I am, I will try to manage on the spot.  A woman might tell me I have not been sensitive enough to her needs, or attentive enough, or liberal enough with my time, and I offer all the assurances I can conceive of with a sincere heart.  I am nothing if not an earnest beau.  Nevertheless, the dreaded break-up comes…and then, weeks if not years later, when I’ve settled into a steady friendship with the woman in question, I learn that the episode was something of a test.  I should have chased after her; I should have fought to win her back.  I should have stalked her, picked fights with her new boyfriend, and gotten all Cusack on her ass.  Ergo, I must be both a reject and a failure, since I did not realize that these elaborate kiss-offs should really be considered opportunities for me to prove the depth of my passion.  Frankly, I blame Catholic school.

All in all, I reckon those two variations on a theme account for about 80% of my relational failures.  The former I can live with:  we are all entitled to our deal-breakers, and if I happen to give massages in a way that reminds her of an old boyfriend or if I happen to have an IQ that suggests to her dubious prospects for socialization or if I happen to fail to “give her the wall,” showing a reckless disregard for her personal safety, then so be it.  (And lest you think me nuttier than usual, those are all actual examples of snafus that have undone relationships in my sordid past.)  Some deals were meant to be broken.  The latter makes me feel as though I should watch more episodes of Gossip Girl and perhaps invest in a good boom-box.  Alternately, I could gnaw off my own head.

In much the same spirit, I believe I’m entitled to my own standards.  If a woman dates me, dumps me, dates some other feller, and returns a penitent (her comparison shopping having taught her that I am the bee’s knees and he is the bee’s cankles), a decent man might choose to renew the acquaintance.  I am not a decent man; I stitch up my scars and move on.  Likewise, on those occasions when a galpal opts out of an engagement with me, citing gangrene or stab wounds, rejects my offers of attendance, and then appears out on the town with her peeps, I assume the magic is gone, notes from Asclepius notwithstanding.  Solitude is difficult, but weathering the affections of a woman who holds me in such low esteem erodes the soul.  And let’s face it, I don’t have much soul to work with.

Lest you think me some kind of doctrinaire monster, it’s worth knowing that those who earn places in my affections technically cannot “wrong” me:  they are never subject to my rigorous second chance policy because they cannot exhaust their first chance.  Fun fact:  when folks who are close to me apologize, I often need them to explain how they thought they’d offended me.  Part of the reason my best relationships never escalate into second-chance territory is because all the petty transgressions that might sever a lesser connection can never accumulate sufficient force when forgiveness is a given.

Solitude is where I live, which is not to say I don’t let people in.  Like most folks, however, I’m disinclined to invite bad guests back, and when it comes to relationships I think all I can do is leave the door open and hope that the best guests will stay.

If you handed me a mug and told me it was full of “autumnal froth,” I would totally drink it.  I cannot help but think this will someday be my undoing.

I’ve had a reasonably busy week, which is why I’ve been a bit of a posting delinquent.  I must admit, however, that I’m enjoying this particular flavor of busy.  Last September I was devoting a ludicrous amount of time to class preparation; I had the moderately absurd notion in my head that I could anticipate just about every vagary of conversation that might occur in three classes.  I’ve been logging quite a bit of time this year for prep as well, but said prep has added more meaningful, concerted content.  Moreover, I’ve also tried to be more welcoming and accommodating of classroom surprises, and my students are so sharp that they deliver one or more in just about every session.  All I really have to do sometimes is show up and look pretty.  I have my uses, after all.

In a fairly freakish surprise, I’m also excited about this semester’s committee work.  No, I haven’t been drinking.  Well, maybe a little wiggedy fizz.

Two of my committee responsibilities (Excellence in Teaching and Honors) involve dispensing awards and scholarships.  That, I think you’ll agree, is pretty swell.  I’m also a member of the Grievance Committee inside the College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences, which might be the best possible introduction to the ins and outs of CMU’s approach to policy.  I’ll be on the happy side of the desk for one or two hiring committees, and I’m chairing our departmental public relations committee, which has a number of interesting and valuable programs on tap.  By the end of the year we’ll have produced some tangible results–programs for students, programs for alumni, a renovated website–and concrete goals of that nature tend to keep me on task.  I’m unsurprisingly anxious about being the chair, but some of my favorite folks in the department are also on the committee.  Odds are I’ll stumble, but I don’t think I can fall too far.

It’s also been an interesting week in verse for me.  I received a rejection notice for poems I sent out just last Monday, which is a surprisingly quick turnaround, and I also received a very kindly rejection notice for work I mailed out in Septmber 2006.  Rejection, as you might expect, is not innately festive, but I appreciate it when editors respond with alacrity (as in the former case) or consideration (as in the latter).  I also draw a bit of reassurance from knowing that a) I did not flub the postage and b) my record-keeping is reasonably sound.

In better news still, I received my first (he said optimistically) acceptance notice of the academic year; it’s especially nice when that happens about a week before the business of 2007-08 officially comes to a close (we turn in our summary reappointment files on September 22nd).  More jaunty still is the fact that I was on the cusp of including the poem in a new set of submissions to be mailed out in the next couple of weeks, which would have obliged me to send out a cavalcade of hasty withdrawal notices.  At year’s end I always feel a little deflated, as though the work of the prior academic session must be relegated to the past, leaving me empty-handed in the present.  That was especially true during this long, quiet summer.  A little good news, however, is enough to buoy me up and get me thinking in the future tense, which is something like my natural habitat (spatiotemporally speaking).  Another poem from the same set has made it through the initial review stage of another journal, so my hopes have a more concrete form than usual.  I have a good attitude about concrete.

This weekend I think a little R&R is in order.  I’ve done about 80% of the prep for next week’s classes, and I’ve even addressed and stamped envelopes for my next set of submissions.  I’ve got to return to short fiction soon, but I think that the next couple days will afford me the chance to reconsider some older verse before the clock strikes fall.

I’ll keep this brief today, as I’m dog-tired and need to conserve enough energy to rant and rail against Thomas Gray à la Samuel Johnson.  I had a mighty fine long weekend (not so much festive as productive), but it squeezed a lot of juice out of the bouncing bald man.

September 1st marks the start of submission season, at least insofar as many university-affiliated presses (or presses staffed by folks with academic day jobs) open their inboxes at the end of the summer siesta, and I wanted to start the wheels turning and develop a plan for getting my work out into circulation.  The whole “develop a plan” notion, however, went the way of Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey, and I instead launched into full-blown poem preparation.  I spent most of the day Friday searching for new places I might send my work and almost all of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday revising (oh! the revising), sifting, sorting, printing, and packaging.   Quite frankly I had hoped to finish scarcely a third of the work I actually completed, and as a result I’m terribly pleased with myself.  Keep your fingers crossed:  about 60% of the poetry submissions I intend to send out this fall hit the mailwaves at about noon today.  I have so much adhesive from “Forever” stamps on my fingers right now that I could probably hang from the ceiling.

Two surprises from this batch.  First, trial and error seems to have taught me ways to overcome the worst of my obsessive-compulsive tics.  If I had more energy I would detail the process, but suffice it to say that I have somehow engineered a system in which complex redundancy protects me from all the usual anxious errors:  using the wrong address or salutation, neglecting important formatting requirements, forgetting to enclose a SASE, and the like.  I still probably check and recheck my work more than most folks, but I’ve managed to turn what was once an ordeal into a process–no small feat in my book.

Moreover, I’ve discovered that music aids and abets my handling of the rudiments of submission.  This is not true of most of my endeavors, but the kind of rhythmic, ritualistic, systematic effort involved in culling and preparing my best work for a number of journals flows more smoothly with a submission soundtrack playing in the background.  All the small yet crucial details seemed a bit more intuitive and effortless for reasons I won’t analyze overmuch, but I found it enormously satisfying to seal each envelope with a higher degree of confidence than usual.  At the very least, if I made dozens of unconscionable gaffes they went down much more smoothly. 

Frankly, I’ll take my smoothlies in any flavor I can get.