Catching Up

It's been a while, I know.

Busy with the usual end-of-the-semester grading orgy, not being 100%, writing a gazillion letters of recommendation (all of which I am happy to do, by the way) and having my trusty old Toshiba giving it up for the ghost (don't worry dear friends, as I am very good about backing up files on my flash drives). So now, I've returned to an Apple.

Actually, my first computer--this was around 1983--was a Leading Edge, with no hard drive. It had two floppy disc drives, one to hold the word processing program, WordStar, and the other for the file, all 640 kilobites worth. No Windows, no mouse, no tracking pad, no pointer, but all DOS commands. And at my first full-time teaching job, this was in 1988, we had Apple II-E machines, and so for about four years, I was fully introduced to the wonders of early Word programs.

So now I have a MacBook, and I'm trying to get used to the Control Window buttons on the upper left corner, but I'm happy with this reunion. Of course, this reacquaintance also explains why I've been a bit pokey in keeping up with the blog.

And then there's the ways Gerri and I keep Christmas, or for us, the Solstice. The Christmas thing, we mostly brace ourselves against the displays, the consumerism, and the transparent hypocrisies. But yes, there's much that we love about the festivities, too, and we're suckers for the Alistair Sim Scrooge, for pop standard renditions of Christmas songs, and for the promise of more light and rebirth.

Anyway, I've written enough about my own ambivalences and agnosticism, and in short I ultimately believe in what Joan Didion believes in: Geology. It seems sufficient (or Newtonian physics, too), to know that the Earth has reached this rather bounded and predictable point in its orbit of the Sun, and to see the evidence simply in the relative height of Orion's ascendancy in the evening sky. Oh, I know even reading those signs are arbritrary, disjointed, fleeting, which also comforts me.