First Year Down

One year down, one-ish to go. My brain is slowly recovering from the past few weeks. In the past nine days I have turned in around 65 pages of written material for three different courses: one paper on John Donne and the fashioning of his soul at the time of his conversion from his native Catholicism to the Reformed faith; one on the kinship between Charles Dickens and the man who performed for Dublin what Dickens performed for London, James Joyce; and one on a Marxist reading of John Milton’s political document, The Second Defense of the English People, which defended the English people (imagine that) in the wake of the execution of the English monarch, Charles I, who was killed in the Puritan revolution.

Since these three things are almost entirely unrelated to each other, I feel like my brain was like a rotor with three spokes that at each end represented my term papers and I was constantly rotating between them. And there was no escape. I even dreamed about writing papers. But it is over now. I am looking forward to the summer—I am most likely going to be doing some landscaping for a company in Manhattan and preparing to be a father. Clara is getting big and is without a doubt the most beautiful pregnant woman in this world. 

Another beautiful feature of the summer is that I get to read whatever I want. In a sense. Part of my reading will be preparation for next year’s thesis project, but I am also enjoying a long, narrative novel right now. I took a course this semester on British Modernism, a form of writing which focuses on technique over content and individual consciousness over linear narrative. Most of the books we read were amazing and enjoyable, but after four months of feeling trapped inside another person’s mind, I am looking forward to reading stories for a bit.

Right now I am in El Paso, visiting old friends for a few days. I had a friend driving from Michigan to El Paso who was stopping for a night with us in Kansas. I decided to hop in with him for the second half of his trip. When we got in late Tuesday night there was a windstorm blowing dust against our vehicle at about 50 miles per hour. That’s my El Paso. That same day there was a mountain lion loose in town that a trigger happy cop shot while he was trapped inside a garage. I did not find out about this until after my trail run in the mountains that morning. It is great to be back for a few days and run the old trails and play Ultimate with my old team, and have conversations and meals with far too many calories with old friends. I am also enjoying a brief reprieve from the Kansas summer that started a few days before I left. I forgot how oppressive mid-90s and humidity can feel.

We have a couple of weddings in Colorado that warrant some trips out there this summer so we are looking forward to that. But, of course, the summer will be dominated by the arrival of our first child, Owen ____ Coffman. We are indecisive on the middle name at this point. It seems like every time we discuss the options we add another name to the list. 

I guess that will do it for now. I am looking forward to doing some less intense writing this summer on subjects of my own choosing. Those should be seen here soon.