do I really have time for Law & Order?

Crazy busy this week, it seems. Reading reading reading. Responding responding responding to student work. Trying desperately to catch up with what I've assigned students to do. Trying still to catch up on the reading for the trauma course I'm sitting in on this semester. Wondering where all my time is going. I have ten minutes left until Law & Order comes on, but since it's over at 9, I can get a bit more work done before going to bed. I think.

If you haven't already read it, please get yourself a copy of Cheryl Strayed's essay "The Love of My Life," which was anthologized in the 2003 Best American Essays. Oh. My. God. That's all I'm sayin'. Okay, I'll say just a bit more:

We like to say how things are, perhaps because we hope that's how they might actually be. We attempt to name, identify, and define the most mysterious of matters: sex, love, marriage, monogamy, infidelity, death, loss, grief. We want these things to have an order, an internal logic, and we also want them to be connected to one another. We want it to be true that if we cheat on our spouse, it means we no longer want to be married to him or her. We want it to be true that if someone we love dies, we simply have to pass through a series of phases, like an emotional obstacle course from which we will emerge happy and content, unharmed and unchanged. (294)

Fontana and Green, they're calling me now.