One Down Five To Go

My first week of teaching this summer's intensive is already over. This is the twenty-first year in a row I've taught in the Rhetoric Department at UCB, and somehow each year I manage to forget how, well, very intensive these intensives are. I slept in this morning, watched a diverting frothy BBC spy melodrama on blu-ray, and more or less spaced out all day recovering from the level of energy I expended in this first week already. It's a good class and a good group this year, I think -- their alertness and eagerness would be a terrible thing to disappoint or squander and it is wonderful, really, still feeling myself incited to reach them with everything I've got to communicate what I care about so much. But I'll tell you, the minute I sink into a seat on the bus on my way home from class it's like I scatter into shards. If nothing else, all this seems a lovely diversion from the last idiotic pyrotechnics of this demoralizing primary election.