All my friends are going to wonder what's wrong with me. I was supposed to be the smart kid and now I'm working as an adjunct and a freelancer and I'm not married and the part I really hate is that I'm not married and I wish it didn't bother me. I'm not sure why it bugs me as much as it does. Maybe because I thought the last guy was IT, you know? I thought we would get married. So when he said ‘I don't know whether we should renew the lease' I said ‘I know we've had a couple of rough patches recently, but I don't think that this means the whole thing is over, I just think that we need to work on stuff -- maybe even go to counseling.' But he said it just wasn't on his agenda.

So I left before he could leave. That was a joke, too, right? Because he drove me out. I mean, if a roach leaves your apartment after you fumigate, it doesn't mean the roach decided coincidentally it was the right...

Teachers need Machiavelli.

Okay, teachers also need a couple of things Machiavelli lacks, such as a generosity of spirit, a sense of empathy, and a creative delight in the sheer magnificence of the universe, but that doesn't rule out my whole needing-Machiavelli theory.

Who, apart from those working with students, are a more perfect audience for the advice freely dispensed by this notorious author of the hard-hearted political masterpiece? True, most of us associate Machiavelli with ruthlessness, viciousness, and an unapologetic appetite for power most often associated with the Borgias, the Medicis, or those occupying the higher ranks of administration. 

Machiavelli is not an author you'd shelve next to most books written by those with an eye toward service learning; he is not a warm and fuzzy build-up-your-low-self-esteem kind of guy. Beloved by dictators and despots alike, Niccolo...

Maybe you think I've just been in the ladies' room all this time, but that's not the case. I haven't been blogging as frequently as I had in the past for a couple of reasons: I'm still not confident about or comfortable with the new software and format of "Brainstorm" and miss the more lively, if insane, exchanges with readers who made up names and, in all probability, entire personalities -- and I've had a complicated semester (both good and bad) this fall. But I'm knocking on wood and hoping that things will calm down and resume their routine.

Routine starts to look great when you've been away from it for a while. Ever notice that?

One of the more bizarre things I've done...

The girl in gray by the bank of telephones,

shuffled from foot to foot, chilly although indoors.

Two darker girls waited for calls, smoking,

and a redhead wept because

she couldn't get continuous purring, what

the Brits then call a dial-tone.

Different phrases for the same thing.

Parallel lines, not too oblique.

Tears and mascara made her face a rag doll's,

sown together, seams showing. When she got through

then smiled, one tooth covered another in the

front of her grin.

The girl in gray was ringing her teacher about meeting.

For lunch. Innocent.

They were both in London. She was abroad. He was on leave.

"What are you doing today?" she asked him. "How about now?" he said.

So they sat among the paperbacks at Dillons.

Her first paper on Marvell's Magnanimous Despair went unwritten. 

They talked of lovers ("No one wrote her lines in life," he said)

("She...

I sort of don’t want to say anything until you watch this new "app."

Okay, now that you've watched it, you get what I mean, right?

You see, I thought it might just be impossible to: 1. degrade women further in popular culture; 2. make men seem more loutish and brutish than they already appear in popular culture.

But I was so utterly and entirely wrong that I'm feeling just a little bit embarrassed about my own naivete right now.

Because once you've learned from a student, as I did today, that any person with a certain kind of hand-held device who feels he is in a big hurry to meet women can now classify them instantaneously into 24 types and then get immediate pointers -- sort of like sexual Cliff Notes -- on how to "score" with each one, want to know what happens?

You realize you know you can't keep up with your usual level of cynicism anymore. That leaves you with a sense ...

Let's start with a cliché: Italian-Americans have more fun during a Sunday dinner than many other ethnic groups have in two or three years.

Protest all you want that I'm invoking a stereotype, but please understand that your argument in no way undermines my claim. I've not only attended these dinners,  I've cooked them (as you learned from several of my earlier posts).

Few Italian-Americans would dispute the axiomatic portrait of the tribe as a family-centered, conversation-loving, food-appreciating, spirited group.  

Certain cultural clichés have power because they essentialize and illuminate a portion of the truth and this is one. Trust me.  

One stereotype about Italian-Americans, however, is worth fighting over: that of the Italian-American as a deliberately dense, badly educated, and culturally unsophisticated person. The idea of Italian-Americans as a people who would never choose to...

The updates I receive daily from Publisher’s Weekly more often than not amuse, invigorate, and infuriate me. They give me a kick. They make me feel like I have a grasp on the slippery world of professional publishing (as opposed, I guess, to unprofessional publishing -- the definition of which might form the basis of another post).

They force me to read about what’s being written; they make me complain about other writers; they make me worship other writers; they offer me comparisons (invidious and otherwise); they keep me in the loop, or at least in the audience.

I like seeing how the bookstores are doing, whether the trends are up or down, cheerful or dismal, who is leaving where and going where, and whether there are jobs available for my undergraduates and graduate students who’ve cherished hopes of working for the three or so publishing houses still viable in this economy.

Today, how...

Through the double glazing
a small boy stands
searching the sidewalk
outside the barbershop.

Nose against the glass
in the late afternoon,
his father's empty place
quiet behind his back.

Tall blue bottles with
silver tops reflect
in the wide high mirror;
steel scissors left open
catch and clip
the late day sun.

The child paces
a white tile floor
hands in pockets,
pointed chin lowered
as if in a storm,

he moves while his
father sleeps in the
last chair, away from
the door.

The boy would
call in passersby, put
up flags, buy an ivory
barber pole,

but he cannot. His
eyebrows run like
a ragged seam
across his face.

With a sleeve he
rubs the window
where his hands
left their mark.

So, as I asked in an earlier post, why does it seem so much easier for some people to write than for others?

Why are some better at it than others, especially when we now have spell check, grammar check, even creative writing software that will tell you if your sentence structure gets repetitive?

Let’s go back to the kitchen for a comparison -- not to write on the napkins, but to compare writers to cooks.

Think of the worst meal you’ve ever eaten at a friend’s house (keep the name of the friend to yourself). Now think of the smell and the texture of the food, the slipperiness or toughness, or graininess or grit; consider how it looked on the plate, or the fork, or in your hand; recall how it felt going into your mouth (and what it did thereafter -- I’ll let you extend this image as far as you’d like to take it). 

Now think of one spectacularly and genuinely amazing meal. Breathe in, smile, ...

Hi, Miroslava, I'm your "childless academic peer."

I read Professor Chávez-García's article called "Superprofessor Meets Supermom," and I could only think about how absolutely middling my own ambition and performance has been in comparison to hers.

I have to say that I was bothered by Professor Chávez-García's rather smug -- or at least it seemed that way to me -- reference to her envy of her "childless academic peers": "Unlike my childless academic peers, I do not have the luxury -- and, yes, it is a luxury I covet -- of spending all my time conducting research or simply thinking about the significance of my work."

Do you think that just because people don't have kids they don't have lives?

Do you think that somehow not having a small child actually frees you having the burden of an emotional life?

This is in no way to detract from my colleague's courageous and daunting ambitions. As a...