How much like a company picnic is an English Department picnic? One thing's for sure, I'm guessing the conversation at the English picnic will be loads more interesting.

Yes, mingling and schmoozing is an important part of academia, just like it is in the real world. Unlike most corporate events, though, I'm looking forward to this one, except for one thing - I'm horrible at names, see, and since Godfrey gets to come to this event, I will be really embarrassed when it comes time to introduce him to all the grad students I spent the summer with. Jeez, I even had to look up the name of my Romantic Lit professor! And there's no booze allowed at the university setting where this picnic will take place, so I can't get drunk and blame our friend Al Cohol (not that I would do that, mind you, but at this point I'm pretty desperate).

Other than a rising sense of panic about the name situation - school is good. As a student, I'm grooving on my classes, the aforementioned Romantic Lit and a super-cool seminar on "literature from a historicist perspective, tracing a cultural history of trade, piracy, slavery and captivity from the late Elizabethan period to the end of the seventeenth century (ca. 1560-1690)." Get this: I get to do a research paper! W00t!, as the young kids say! (News flash for all who didn't already know this - I'm a geek.)

Teaching is going well, too, I do enjoy it but we'll see how much wisdom I'm actually imparting when their first rough drafts of their first essay assignment come in. The first day was a bit awkward, but it's been getting better ever since. The worst part about teaching is my alleged office - a cubicle in the basement of the building next to the English department. I'm not objecting to the cubicle, as modern life has conditioned most of us to working 8-5 in the padded cell-like environment. But the basement setting which holds the cubicle is incredibly dank, damp, drafty, and gray, though the T.A.s that have passed before me, in an attempt at lifting the dreariness of the setting, have scrawled poetic grafitti on the walls. I'll have to get me a set of Sharpies and join in on that fun, but being down there for the requisite five hours a week is not too good for my allergies, in fact I usually have a sore throat after spending any time there. Oh well.

Meanwhile, we have to wait on my student loan to arrive before we can get the washing machine fixed. Not cool. But there's a laundrymat in the apartment complex just up the hill from us, so we're trying to keep ahead of the disaster that would be a lack of clean clothes.