Thursday was easily the most emotional day I had. First, the Pirate admitted that on his way home from taking our daughter to school, he heard a song that we had first heard together, and it made him so sad that he almost had to pull over. Of course, while he was telling me this at lunchtime, I got all weepy, and that just set him off again. The lectures were interesting (including another great revision lecture), but the best one by far was a lecture called “Destroying the Book” by one of the outgoing cohort, Raymond Gaston. Its premise was that the form we think of as “book” is a recent construct created by current printing technology. His definition of “post-modern” was a thing that was easily digitizeable and replicable, and therefore “post-post-modern” books are things that cannot be digitized and replicated, such as Anne Carson’s work Nox, a handmade “book” consisting of yards of accordion-folded paper containing the epitaph she wrote for her brother’s death. The class spent time creating visual art to accompany a reading by one of the other students. I was flattered that the author of the work asked me if she could keep mine.

I hurried home Thursday night so that I could finish writing up my “project period contract,” a list of the work that I’m going to accomplish between now and May 18th (the end of the marking period). I’ve committed to between 20 and 25 pages of new material every month, as well as two book annotations (I have a reading list of 10 books), a bunch of online meetings, and anything that I need to do for my field study (you’ll hear more about this later, as I’m not sure we’re allowed to talk about it yet). I wrote everything up, and then sat back to talk to the Pirate. We’ve been using Facetime, and it’s been mostly amazing, allowing me to see my adorable baby’s face and the Pirate’s handsome dimples every night before I hit the sack. This time, though, I started misting up, then the Pirate started choking up, and before I knew it, we were both crying.

And then I went to bed.