In the middle of the middle of the end.

Why does blogging seem like a big question mark, wrapped in briars, right now?

I don't give a damn about the blogging zeitgeist. I have loved this space as a little art gallery, as a place to try things, as a small space to speak. I think I still do love it. I'm sure I still love it, but something is getting in the way.

Is it that the many ways to enter this space--visual, textual--crowd its entrance?

Is it that life itself seems thick with sadnesses, potential and real?

Is it that the marker of my work life, the semester, is at its most crushing point?

Oh, let's focus on the semester. By all means, the semester, with its thicket of grading, its consultations, its many indicators that my optimism may be unwarranted, that I am not, as it were, succeeding in aiding my students toward their achievement of the course outcomes? Is it that school life is filled not with nouns but nominalizations? Is it that the semester's weather has finally settled into its wintry trajectory?

I want and do not want to talk about the many deaths that seem to be accompanying me along my path. They're not my deaths--am I even allowed to talk about them as if they were my own story? The walk alongside a loved one, if briefly, in the valley of the shadow, as it is said--not my story. My own age pressing on me--this is my story, but it is not delightful.

I know I have delightful stories to tell. I live them almost every day. I'm sure I have small amusing anecdotes to tell about the inventive definitions my students are concocting for syntactical terms. Pictures to post. Things to celebrate. I have them. They spill out of my handbag whenever I go looking for my lipstick, and fall out of my pockets with the small change, and trail behind me, an invisible vapor, when I walk from here to there.

I feel like I just had to say this: it has been a long year with much grief, some of which feels very close to me and which I don't have the blog-language to talk about. Maybe I can say it in poems, but only maybe; and if I don't say it here, anything else I do say would feel dishonest to me. So tomorrow, I hope to be able to set this all to the side, at least for the moment, having acknowledged it, and get on with the business of joy, which business I want to choose every day if I can.