Easier to wake up these mornings—the routine of getting up at half seven and the fact that the sun is rising earlier. Also, an unaccountable joy has been capturing my heart and mind, an effervescence, even as recognition of my worthlessness weighs down.

Usual morning routine. The day was quite chilly, though very sunny and still. I practiced my flute and went to HON. After HON, Gavin, RCS, and I ate lunch together. We were an unusually quiet bunch, for the three of us. The two of them walked with me when I had to leave abruptly for Tyrrell at one o’clock. Flute lesson.

Professor R brought a Baroque flute to my lesson today. The delight of beautiful things…! One of the loveliest looking and sounding instruments I know turns out to be the Baroque flute. It’s shorter than the modern flute and stouter, though tapering considerably from headjoint to footjoint. It’s made out of European boxwood, Professor R explained, and because the wood must be thick enough before it can be used for the flute, the makers have to fell three-hundred-year-old trees in order to carve these instruments. The wood is a deep reddish brown with six small fingerholes and one lever on the footjoint. It has no lip plate, but only a hole in the headjoint. It’s lighter, smoother, more buoyant. No mechanism to interfere with finger movement, so trills and fast passages are much more fluid. The sound quality is entirely different as well. For one thing, it sounds a half step flat. Its sound is diffuse, mellow, open, haunting. I halted through a scale, and then Professor R played the opening of the Bach B minor sonata—lovely, silken. So we spent the rest of the lesson playing Blavet’s fifth sonata and trying to get my metal instrument to sound like his wooden one. It actually went alright. Both of us were enjoying ourselves, I think, until a quarter to two, when I had to leave abruptly yet again.

I went back to the apartment. At two o’clock, Sara W, the intern coordinator at Horn Creek, rang me for a phone interview. I sat in the oblong of sunshine on the floor and tried to answer her questions as honestly as possible. Inquiries along the lines of “How did you choose your college and your major? Do you have mentors? Describe your greatest strength. Describe your greatest weakness. Why do you want to work in a camp setting? What is your testimony and your relationship with Christ, especially over this last year? Have you ever been self-indulgent in your life? What are you reading right now?” and so forth. I had been extremely concerned about the interview. Not that it would go well, necessarily, but that I would be honest: after trying to answer questions like this, I always feel extremely fake.

After the half-hour interview, I spent the rest of the afternoon working on my ENGL 4993 “note” for Dr. E. I experience so much resistance right now to writing. It’s terrible. It took me an hour-and-a-half to write this one small one-page paper about “The Knight’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales. Ridiculous. RCS came back at three o’clock and worked quietly on her laptop. At four o’clock, I napped for half-an-hour. When I got up, I sat on the floor against the sofa and read Carla Harryman books for ENGL 4863. Listened to Beethoven’s violin concerto and Brahms’s second piano concerto. Since I wasn’t enjoying the poetry much at all, the music was even more beautiful, more rich, hearing harmonies I hadn’t encountered before. Evening came gradually outside, lingeringly.

RCS and I ate tea in the caf at six o’clock. Philip was in the caf at the same time, so we stopped to say hello to him. He was astonished that RCS is a black belt in tae kwon do, which he’s learning from a friend right now. RCS and I went back to our apartment. I was preparing to settle down to work before small group at seven o’clock when CMAM rang. Cliff’s funeral was today. She described vividly to me the scene in the common room: made me ache to be there so much.

Hannah showed up at seven o’clock for small group, so I prayed for CMAM on the phone, then said good-bye. Hannah, Rachel, RCS, and I made up the contingent tonight. We studied Psalm 8. Thanks to combined lack of sleep and dose of coffee, Hannah was slap-happy, which turned out to be contagious. We had some pretty whacky moments tonight. RCS talked about how human beings are “vanishingly small epsilons”, and Rachel said something about how “We are the crumbs of the universe.” It was a really good discussion, though, and then we prayed through the Psalm afterward. Bible study ended at half eight or so.

When the girls had left, Crystal came over. She’d been at the etiquette dinner tonight. She had a new issue of “Six thirty one” with her, which we perused with gusto, especially Alex’s article about surviving an earthquake while studying abroad. Crystal eventually succumbed to the red sofa, where she is currently stretched out, tapping her bare feet together and reading Guyland. RCS sits on the floor with her laptop in her pajamas, staring intently at the screen. I’ve been drinking lemon tea and eating animal crackers. Also replying to Facebook messages. I want to be reading a piece by Adorno for ENGL 4983, but my eyes and brain are tired. Was just talking to Nicole on the phone, too, laughing about how St. Augustine uses the phrase “brazenly stupid” in the middle of a philosophical teaching piece. Hooray for political incorrectness in ancient writers.