September 16: Friday Morning, Nobel Prize Again, Relaxing

It is Friday morning, early, and I'm enjoying the fact that I don't have to teach or edit or grade or anything today.  I'm a little bushed from the week's activities.  It seems like I've been running a race for the past five days, and I've just crossed the finish line.  Excuse me while I collapse on the ground and just...breathe.

I will be getting off work early today (around 11:30 a.m.), and I will be going out to lunch with my wife and son.  Then I will be cleaning my house and taking my daughter to her tap dancing class early this evening.  That's all that I really have to do.  If I accomplish anything else, I will count myself lucky.

You may not have realized it, but, between the first and second paragraphs above, I took a half-hour break to check some discussion threads I've been following about this year's Nobel Prize in Literature.  I already wrote about my obsession with the subject yesterday.  It seems, as of this morning, many odds makers are favoring Cormac McCarthy again this year.  (Last year, right up until the last day, he was one of the favorites.)  If McCarthy is leading the pack right now, that probably means he's not going to win.  Ask Amos Oz or Adonis, whove been in that position quite frequently.

I wil try to avoid daily reports about the Nobel Prize.  It's difficult for me around this time of year.  It doesn't help that my birthday (October 5) falls right around the day that they announce the award.  I just think God planned it that way so that, on my birthday some year, I will actually get a call from the Swedish Academy, telling me I've won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  It's, like, fate.

Well, I'm going to go make myself some breakfast and relax a little bit.  I may try to get a poem written in the next hour or so.

The day is spreading out before Saint Marty like the Pacific Ocean.  Dolphins.  Sea otters.  Kelp.  Waves.  Warmth.

My day...