St. Monday and the Ignorants

...'cuz it's done. There is some feeling of relief that I have now completed all of my coursework (15 15-pagers) and preliminary (preliminary!) exams, but I feel really awful about losing that near-indescribable feeling I once had at the completion of a school year. Mid-June, I'd wear my shorts to school on the only day when such wardrobe was permissable, and after about an hour and a half of pedagogical irresponsibility I would leave the doors of Durand-Eastman school as if an invisible Berlin Wall had been struck down between me and the reality of Western New York summer. The possibility existed, I know I believed somewhere in my pre-pubescent (sp?) psyche that maybe it could be possible that that would be the last day of school for me ever -- that surely I would at least die before September, it being an incomprehensible three months away.

Repetition reifies, I guess; year in and out one grows accustomed to such a feeling, its novelty becoming routine, and the freedom it offers deliquescing (sp?) into the ironcially pedestrian hope that one's parents won't need the car all summer long. In this, my twenty-something-ieth year in academia (if you count high-school teaching, which I do due to the schedule involved rather than the quality of work performed), even the milestone of the MA in English (last June) means little more than the incipient necessity that one must apply for funding for the next year, or for a position at some institution for the fall. I suppose there is a measure of relief; but I hesitate even to ascribe any value to that; you can't relax for even a second or, as I read in a book one time, you will "wreck yo'self."

The steadily-building monotony of mid-twenties life aside, I just know this summer will be different. And indeed it will, at least in the number of hours I'm on the clock, as I won't be working at Tanglesnatch any more. I don't know if I've come to my senses or if I've just stopped caring about having money. At any rate, as the title of this webular-log suggests, I will be using this site as something of a creative outlet for my band, St. Monday and the Ignorants. The name swipes something from Benjamin Franklin and from the high-school version of myself (the student version, not the teacher version). Ask me about it when you get a chance because I'm not too keen on posting that kind of stuff. So everyone who reads this will have to give me suggestions as to how to post mp3s, as well as how get that retarded picture of mine over on the margin where it's supposed to be. Thanks to Vinnie, I now have the technology to move the hits from my analog four-track onto the digital one-track, finally divesting myself of those pesky four other tracks. I expect to put an old tune of mine, entitled "Cheap Sex," up here asap. It was written during a tough time in my life. You could ask Vinnie about it, but I think he actually slept through most of it.

Between reading things I actually enjoy, hitting the South Loop gym, running around Millenium and Grant Parks, and traveling as much as modern science will allow, you have my summer, although you certainly didn't ask for it.