Now Playing: Flook, "Haven". Track 1, "The Tortoise And The Hare".

Tortoise and Achilles, if you ask me: read Godel, Escher, Bach, Emmaline. Or don't read it but look at all the cool Escher sketches.

These days are interesting. If I permit myself, I shall begin to philosophize, and we all know how fun that is.

Our apartment was chilly this morning, but bright sunshine was streaming through the eastern windows. Yesterday was as cloudy and cold as one could wish, but today the weather had swung back to being gloriously fair. October, magnificent, so stunningly beautiful that it is frightening, awesome, remote, the year in its fullness receding to a majestic splendor.

I wrote some rapid e-mail and Facebook answers, then walked over to the chapel. In the main sanctuary, people were setting up for an event later in the day, so I went into the small prayer chapel and shut the heavy doors behind me. The prayer chapel was dim and cool. For the first time in my life, I knelt on one of the red velvet kneelers in front of the great stained-glass window where an angel with golden wings and a white robe kneels on a blue field. As I knelt in prayer, the sun rose slowly behind the window, filling the chunks of glass with color, striking sparklingly off the odd chips and edges, dazzling.

After the hour, I walked back to the apartment, and spent an hour or so working on senior project. Then, at half eleven, Rachel Sr. and I met outside the caf. We picked up sandwiches to go and drove to Woodward Park to eat them. We sat on a wall in the sunshine by the rose gardens. A fat squirrel crept along the wall behind me to within less than six inches of my arm, and even when I waved my hand at it, it refused to go away. Rachel laughed that it looked as though I was trying to cast a spell on it because I kept flicking my hand at it, and it kept scampering back, then creeping closer.

When we finished eating, we walked among the rose beds for awhile. Then we crossed the lane and walked down the hill under the oak trees. We walked along the muddy paths on the hillside between the azalea bushes. Flat ponds at the bottom of the hill, marshy places full of reeds, shimmered under the shadow of the trees where the sun struck them.

I drove Rachel back to campus in time for her one o'clock class. I went to Tyrrell and practiced hard, Bach and Vivaldi. At two o'clock, I went to PHIL 2113. When the madness ended, I walked over to Zink and met with Dr. J. Since Dr. G is gone, Dr. J is the only poetry professor at TU. He resides in a dim office in a back nook in Zink, one of those offices lined with books, with a slouchy old couch on one side and a desk stacked with papers under the windows across from the door. He always reminds me of an odd combination of hippie and cowboy, somehow, black jeans and suit jacket and trim greying beard. Very friendly. We talked about poetry and translation theory and all the wild and woolly ins and outs of paratextuality and intertextuality and Genette and Susan Howe and Beowulf. He also gave me some advice about applying to graduate schools.

As usual, upon stepping out of Zink, I felt a desperate urge to clear my head of all the nonsense it had absorbed while I'd been in the building. I love English and talking about English, but Englishy-ness also does my head in, no right angles or ups and downs but all loops and curves. Going dizzy by watching a kite fly for too long. So I walked around campus and took pictures of the buildings basking in the late afternoon sunshine. Then I went over to ACAC to meet Nicole for tea at five o'clock.

I was early, so I stood by Carrello's, the wee coffee shop, and chatted with Philip. We were fairly deep for awhile, but then one of his coworkers, busy in the coffee shop, called him over to draw a monkey on a piece of notebook paper. He obliged, and conversation descended (or ascended) into silliness.

Nicole came by not long after. The two of us went to The Hut (sports bar in ACAC) for tea. We sat in a booth and ordered pizza. We spent a couple of hours talking there. It was refreshing. By the time we were walking back to Mayo apartments, dusk was falling. In the west, Venus burned through the elm trees, and in the south, Jupiter was glowing near the brilliant half moon. The sky was pellucid, ringing with color like a deep bell. On the new U, the fountains were going: jets of water splashing sky-high, spraying color into the air as the lights at their feet changed color. Psychedelic green, aqua, purple, teal, blue, red, orange, magenta, gold. The jets of water are on a long stone paving maybe twenty or thirty feet long by maybe ten feet wide, shooting up in big patterns. Nicole and I pulled off our shoes, rolled up our trouser legs, and splashed onto the pavement between the water. Cold and wet underfoot. We danced and ran and skipped through the water. It was such fun. Nicole and I finally splashed our way back to our shoes again and walked to the apartments.

I went to my apartment and worked on CGE stuff for an hour. Then I went to a (typically dull) Mortar Board meeting. Their ideas about social times are all for pub crawls and casino nights, not my style.

I went to Nicole's apartment to study. She was there by herself, and we sat down to spend a couple of hours working. I worked on CGE stuff for another hour or hour-and-a-half. They want their website information for incoming exchange students (that would include Erasmus) updated. It's good to be on the other side of administration and to be working on application materials for other people to fill out instead of having to fill them out myself.

I'm away to sleep now.