I really need to clean off my desks.

It's normal for me to have a desk covered with papers, periodicals, books, and miscellaneous debris, but right now I've got TWO desks, one at work, and one at home, and each is groaning under a mighly load of written words. My desk at home is covered with bird stuff (my Peterson guide, maps of wilderness areas, newspaper articles about the hunt for the ivory-billed woodpecker down on Louisiana's Pearl River, etc.), catalogs for Woodberry's summer school, and random objects like my bike helmet. In my classroom, my desk has things like my battered Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1981), Lewis Thomas's The Lives of a Cell, Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe (Vol. 1), and a videotape of the Branagh/Thompson Much Ado About Nothing. The vast majority of the stuff on these desks, though, is oddly-sized scraps of paper with mysterious notes on them; "HERE, BUT...?" and "LEMME SEE BIKE" are two of the most mysterious at the moment. Clearly, it's time for me to enter the paperless age.

As a result, I'll be using this page to store a lot of the stuff that used to end up on oddly-sized scraps of paper. I can't promise that it will be great literature; honestly, judging by past experience, I can't even promise that it will be coherent. Maybe you'll learn something about me. Maybe I'll learn something about myself. Or maybe it'll just be a good way to keep myself from being buried under an enormous load of processed wood pulp.

"HERE, BUT...?" indeed.
7:39 AM

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