Saturday morning

It's days like this that I miss my old apartment in Cuyahoga Falls the most. Spending one of the first warm Saturday mornings of the year on the porch with a cup of coffee and a book (I'll leave the cigarettes in the past, thank-you-very-much) would be truly ideal. Having Michael, my nephew, come out to distract me every now and then, but then going to work on his senior design project in the garage with ESPN on in the background would be really nice too. Alas, I'm here in Chicago where my porch is not big enough for a table, and besides, there's this crew working on the building (and has been every nice day since I moved in) that make all kinds of noise and debris, thus making it impossible to spend any time on my tiny balcony.

This is why I have plans to go to my friend Shelly's house a little later on--Shelly has a deck. Also, Shelly thinks that if we work on our papers in the same place at the same time, I'll be able to help her focus. But Shelly lives in Bronzville, which will take me an hour on the el to get to, and it is supposed to rain. I might just bail on Shelly. If I had a car, I'd so be there. But the commute...

Maybe to Bar on Buena. They probably will open the windows (which are the size of garage doors) today. That would be almost like sitting outside.

Or maybe I'll just stay here, where all my books and papers are, where I have a freezer full of food I've already paid for, where I have instant coffee and my favorite mug. The sliding glass door is already open, the birds are chirping, I'm drinking coffee...I guess there's nothing wrong with where I am.

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Today I'll be focusing on my paper for Proseminar--the Political Economy course. The one that really pissed me off at the beginning of the semester. I mean, I'm getting a PhD in English, writing a creative dissertation, and I'm forced to study the Political Economy? What the...? But then I started getting into some of it. Rather, I started getting riled up about the way theorists are describing working class people, and I found my way into the class. So now, I'm trying--emphasis on trying--to write a paper that deals with working class identification / values / discourse as they relate to (or contradict) working class theory. I don't really know if I have the theory chops for this project, but I'm going to give it a shot. And the strange thing is, I'm way, WAY more excited about writing this paper than I am about writing the paper for my contemporary poetry course. So hopefully today is a good, productive, intellectually satisfying day. Maybe I'll learn something.