comeback

Er, this was a longer interval than I'd intended. For the last several weeks I have been living in a frustrating sort of limbo, rendering me completely useless and distracted. The situation now seems to have resolved itself (more or less) in crushing disappointment, which has got me rethinking some of my goals and plans for the next year or two. Add that all to the lack of regular internet access, the demands of teaching preparation, a week of visiting friends and family in Seattle, and the distrating lure of the World Cup, and no blogging is what you get.

I had a lovely week at home, despite the aforementioned woe: gorgeous hot, sunny weather (but not humid like New York: in summer I find the East Coast impossible, and the subway is the devil's railway), visits to childhood haunts and college hang-outs, and lots of time with dear ones of all sorts. People are studying for the bar and signing leases on houses and traveling through Venezuela and all sorts of other marvelous things. I watched the hysterical Netherlands-Portugal game with R. and K. and their daughter M., who was enjoying the record number of red & yellow cards handed out (which she calls tickets, in the manner of those handed out by the traffic police "Baba, the man from Portugal got another ticket!") R. is teaching her Turkish football chants. We met my former student J., who we all hope to lure to the Jackson School; my four-year old cousin M. showed me how to spell "rat" (so I taught her how to spell dinosaur); and my mother and sisters and I painted a room, drove to the beach, bbq'd, and ate quite a lot of gelato.

B. turned out to be visiting at the same time (how many cities does this mean we've met in? he asked, and we counted out: Oxford, London, Cape Town, Bombay, DC, New York, Seattle--not a bad record, and one that tells you something about the strange social networks of Oxford grad students.) We spent an evening out with old schoolfriends of his from Lahore who now work for the Unnamed Software Giant in Redmond, which is how I came to have the pleasantly surreal experience of walking up & down the Seattle waterfront in the quiet, shuttered hour past one in the morning listening to two of them recite Urdu poetry back and forth while we waited for the 2 a.m. ferry.

Now I'm back in Oxford, fighting jet lag and tying up some loose threads in my syllabus. Many thanks to those of you who made suggestions in the reader thread; I'll write another post soon about what I've decided to include. The students arrive tomorrow, so life is going to be even more hectic--but nonetheless Oxford is exercising a sort of gently calming effect, and I'm glad to be here for a month while I try to sort out my messy life.