January fades

A gorgeous, clear morning here in Brooklyn. It rained heavily and gustily on Monday, was warm (meaning, around forty degrees) and beautiful on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then yesterday morning I was putting on my running shoes around 7:30 and looked out the window, and it was snowing mightily. I still went out – it snowed ever more mightily as the time wore on – but running in the snow is lovely when it’s not too deep. And the ground was warm, so the snow melted by the time I’d emerged from the subway in midtown.

But I think it’s pretty cold today.

I still sound like I’m hacking up a lung, and people tend to inch away on the subway, but I’m really quite a lot better. I have enough energy to to walk around and do things, and after two weeks of misery, I’ll take that. I even went running twice this week and will do so again tomorrow.

I’ll be heading toward the IAM office around noon to work and then help coordinate our evening event, a concert/poetry reading by Brooke Campbell and L.L. Barkat. (You should come! But if you’re not in New York, you can still watch it streamed live online at 7pm EST. You probably won’t get a glimpse of me, but you’ll see where I work a couple days a week.)

Before he left this morning, Tom said to me, “Can you believe it’s almost February?” And no, I cannot. Until yesterday I thought it was mid-January. February is an exciting but exhausting time in our world; we’ll head to Jubilee in mid-February, where we’re both presenting workshops, and then two weeks later – this year, it’s the first weekend in March – is the IAM conference. Conferences like this are wonderful, now that we are on the speaker side of things, because we get to meet new friends or see far-flung friends again. But they’re undeniably tiring. I’ll be packing the Airborne when we go to Pittsburgh.

I’m sorry for these dull, quotidian entries. I’m not back into the swing of blogging yet, and I forget the blog exists until Fridays, when I sit down to write blog entries at the other three blogs to which I contribute. I’ll get better. I need to flex the personal essay muscle more, now that I spend a lot of time teaching it.