Post

"Thousands and his bidding speed and post over land and ocean without rest." Now I'm posting on my restless day. Began biking over to the British Art Center where every English major and their cousin, the history major, crowd into the lecture hall for Shakespeare's Histories and Tragedies. Taught by Murray Biggs, a director type who wraps himself around the performativity of the plays and of his own position lecturing to two hundred. He gave the classic line on Henry V, that it's a propaganda play, nationalism all the way. Why it's so open for adaptation by Olivier to rouse 1944 British morale on its way back to Agincourt and why the first performance of it happened in France only six years ago. Said he was saving the subversive elements to illuminate Thursday. After an hour I flowed out from the crisp building onto an October sunlit corner. My bike was waiting faithfully for me, leisurely leaning against a No Standing sign. Not Richard III, I don't need to trade my kingdom for a horse. I had my mount tied up ready to post to the other side of my personality, Biochemistry. I rode the warm fall morning through a gust of leaves that showered down, a loose curtain as I rode through them. Under the angeled arch, I sailed High and curved onto Elm merging with traffic, weaving oblivious pedestrians into the fabric of my morning. I cut ahead of cars, still brutes at the light, twisted onto Grove, then swung into the wide open shade of Hillhouse. A storybook street covered by a canopy made by trees elegantly lining the avenue. Rode to the rack, chained my bike to the bar briskly and strode off to class. Then lunch and Neurobiology lab. Two hours for a microdissection. And dissection is only the set-up for the experiment. It took me three last week and at the last step, when everyone else had already ruined their prep or gone home in frustration, at 6:30 pm, I cut my beautiful spindly little sartorius. But today, after two timeless hours hunched over a microscope, after snipping a millimeter at a time up a frog's thigh, clearing away connective tissue, carving through muscles, rooting around arteries, charming my snakes of lights to show shadows of lines, distinguishing sartorius from sciatic, sighing with horror of having possibly severed the wrong nerve, breathing relief mine and its neuromuscular junction was intact, willing my shaking hands to steady to make the correct cut, I pulled a perfect prep from my pair of legs naked of a torso. And then I had to bike down the hill, grab food at Commons and jump into a convertible leading to Connecticut Hospice. The car belonged to a cynic senior I didn't know. And although we were headed to a place people went to die, we joked and enjoyed the ride listening to Radiohead and out light-hearted selves. And because we were headed to a place people went to die, perhaps this post should read, we joked and enjoyed as an antidote. But today was only the first day of training. And catching a reflected sunset the plain brown building was not as depressing as I'd imagined. The safety coordinator interrupts the nurse regularly to announce with glee, 12-2, 14-2, Red Sox lose, White Sox win. He promises to have us out by 8:05 when the good game starts. The nurse stresses the importance of hand washing against infection so much that I come home and wash my hands like Lady Macbeth for a full minute and am finally my father's germaphobic daughter although all I touched at the Hospice was my pen taking notes. Then chapters of biochemistry and pages of the Prelude. Yankees win. Day leaves me in a moment of lucidity. I understand suddenly what I want and what I don't and this pleases me. I writhe with laughter under my red lantern facing my poems, paintings and posters. Maybe this uncontrollable smiling is all only release from fears of two midterms and an unmanageable schedule. Or it is the insanity of two pots tea. Yet there's the suspicion it's something more. I am sure that I like inhabiting my flesh. It's not just starkly better than being a bundle of twitching muscles under a stimulating electrode or waiting to die at a hospice. I'm suddenly not tired of being human. Twenty lies lightly on my lips. I retract the last syllable on my tongue, taking the word and idea back into myself. Gazing forward, I honestly assume with giddy blind strength that I am falling into place.

162

The regular season is over. A new one's started. Yellow leaves first appeared a couple weeks ago, but it only just got cold. The air feels like fall and fall feels like the postseason, the afterlife of summer. Or the half-life of summer which will be measured in wins and a team that takes a (hands clasped in prayer) long time to decay. It's the days of return. Return to October baseball, return to hopes and to turn back to the World Series wins of the 90's. It's time to return to the church where reform Rosh Shashanna services gather to drape a tapestry over a wooden cross and echo lines sung for centuries. I fought religion for the first half of services, as usual. Thinking of a lecture by dean of grad school last week organized for St. A's, The Problem of Religion in Modern America, I strove with my own. I admired how easy it was to give loyalty to baseball I'd been brought up on and how hard it was to be faithful with a mass of people cheering for one god.