What’s remarkable about most of my graduate school work is, I suppose, that it’s all thinking work. That is, I never have an assignment or a project I can do while watching TV, having a conversation, juggling three chainsaws. This is alternately a source of happiness (I HATE busy work) and concern–In terms of working late into the night, or when tired, and so on, it is always possible to do so with work that merely needs to get done. Information that needs to be internalized, or remembered, or built upon, is information that mostly needs to be learned when one CAN think. Which I can’t always do, after, say 11.

I wonder the extent to which the brain is like a muscle and focus is like an athletic system. Is it possible to get used to lifting heavier weights with your mind, as it is with our arms? It was, when we were younger. Now? How bout attention. If I practice meditation, say, and get very good at narrowing in on a single thought or thing for longer and longer times, will it be as running on a treadmill is? Is it a skill, something I can improve? I think this may be the case.

I’ve been battling a cold, and by battling, I mean, I’ve drunk so much liquid in these last four days that I’m setting world urination records. Yes, there are records.  Why would you question something like that? Bastard. Anyhow, I’m getting better, and I’m excited to resume healthy interactions with human beings(well, healthyish). I’ve now also received a plant from a friend,giving me another living thing in the apartment, which I am now in the process of gently killing. I had help from a recent storm, but, then again, ’twas I who left the window open. Too much of a good thing, indeed.

So next week has the usual barrage of meetings and work, crescendoing till wednesday, followed by a graceful decline into insouciance, and I’m hoping to get the rhythms down j ust right.