Speech and cupcakes.

Today is the last day of class. I found that I really had kind of a great group of students this semester, so I also found that there were cupcakes to be made. It's a cheap thrill, but if you want to feel love, walk into a room of students on the last day of class with cupcakes. They'll listen to anything you have to say. Which is why I had a speech prepared, if by "prepared" we mean "thought up while frosting cupcakes at 7 a.m." Which is, in fact, what we do mean.

My speech had to do with the kind of education I feel these students deserve, with writing as a means to participate in community life, and with knowledge as something that you make for yourself. It's a little sentimental, but I do often feel kind of sentimental at the end of a semester, after having read the students' writing in various iterations and had so many conversations with them. I will miss the baseball cap boys and the just-about-missionaries, the back-to-school moms and the girls who work at fight clubs who are about to become nurses.

However, I will not miss them enough to pine over them when this summer I:

• cook inspired meals from fresh produce
• take naps
• read books, actual books
• write poems
• write an article about poetry reading and the counter-productive teaching practices of English departments
• write an article about extreme rhetoric
• paint pictures
• make books, and
• make King Bruiser, the first film of what I am sure will be a whole new movie career.

I intend to keep outrage at a minimum, but there may be some more letter-to-the-editor writing. Also trips to Idaho. I may pay off my library fines and go to the library. I intend to ride my bike.

And of course, I will blog.