Scribblings with Green Chalk

I woke up today with lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sandpiper” on my mind:

He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

Apart from details of anatomy and physiology, there is little difference between me and the stupid bird trying to count grains of sand. I’m caught up in paperwork, being chewed up by bureacratic jaws, and painfully distracted from my thesis by misfortunes and temptations. I’m panicking about it all taken together and everything separately.

This pancake Sunday with my mom I split my mind between cooking and studying to the extent that I now believe pancake mix lies at the heart of blogging. I need a machine producing Time and Focus. I might disappear from here for a while on a quest for such an invention.