Week One, Day Two

Actually, THIS is day two of the session, day three that I'm here.  It's an absolutely lovely day--warm during mid-afternoon, and then pleasantly cool in the morning and now as the sun is setting.  I'll be off for another walk, just because.  The "neighborhood" here is terrific--mixed deciduous and conifers, rhododendrons in full bloom, sails on the inlet, and the lovely salt air.  Before I leave, I think I'll ask Cathrine what the job prospects seem like . . . .

I am overcoming my initial shyness (yes, for those of you who know me, that is shyness I exhibit from time to time; okay, rarely,  but it's there) and speaking in class. I knew I couldn't be stopped for long.  Odd to be a student again, but rather freeing as well.  I don't have to be "on" for the full three hours--I can intermittently zone in and out, much as my students do, I'm sure.  But mostly, I'm zoned in, as my fellow institutionalites (is that what people who go to an "institute" are?) have all kinds of backgrounds--some in law, others in political science, economics, history, english--and bring a richness of knowledge I envy, but also appreciate.  The creative writer in me knows that we'll all begin to have our "tics" that may very well start driving us crazy by week five, but for now, it's still a sampling of different personalities, from the professor who says we are the same as pigs, to the creative writer who's finding his life work to be working with prisoners at Attica, to the woman from Georgia--the republic of, that is--whose husband, before they moved to the states a few years ago, was imprisoned four times for protesting the government there; she still works with an international human rights watch to help encourage free elections in marginal countries but wouldn't, she says, step foot in North Korea right now--too frightening and too remote.

And so on to the reading for later this week--Agememnon and The Eumenides, Aristotle's Politics, and more.  Can you say "the Greeks rule?"