Some other beginning's end

Okay ... I know ... it's a bit over-played. But it's perfect for this time of the year. We can see the another beginning's end from here. Right now, outside my window, I can hear a chainsaw biting into some logs. I can see the hay that was too poor to bale, lying brown against the greener field, and smell ripening blackberries. Summer is at the height of its aerobic workout. The sweat is rolling off, and the air is panting hard in rhythm, and everyone knows that the next part in the routine is the cool down.

I know that it's easy - and completely honest - for mommies to feel pensive when the summer starts to listen for the next song. I understand the sentiment. I do. After all, every new beginning is some other beginning's end. And so we grieve. At least a little, we grieve over the end of a beginning. I think this must be one good thing about celebrations for transition times. If you throw a party when your son is weaned, or give your daughter a Quinceañera, everyone's celebration can help the mommy a bit. She can weep and she will be understood.

But at the end of summer I am never far from grade school and new pencils and unopened packets of paper. The light at this time of the year reminds me of new clothes on a sewing machine. My own breath quickens with the increasing breathlessness of the air as the song's beat grows stronger.I know, you see. I know what's coming next. I know that when the air mellows, and the colors - colors even now beginning to fade from the outmost edges of the summer's juicy, lush glow - after this song - it will be after this song - the breathing will smooth out. We will stretch. We will cool down. We will lie still. We will find "corpse pose" again, and with the colors in the leaves, we will recede into thoughts again. School. Writing. Thinking. The scent of piles of leaves and sundried evergreen needles in the dust. Here it comes. It's after this next song.

• 1. Finish and submit a completed PLA Portfolio
• 2. Take three CLEP tests and don't put it off any longer
• 3. Online: LITERARY AND CRITICAL THEORY

LIT 321E, 3 crs.
David Plotkin
This course examines the history of literary theory while focusing on significant contemporary approaches to literary interpretation. Students will explore the relationship between literature and various other critical approaches, such as in philosophy, linguistics, political-economy, historicism, post-colonial theory, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. Core requirement for major.

• 4. Weekend: THE LITERATURE OF RESISTANCE

LIT 352A or CLS 352A, 3 crs.
Perrin Kerns
This course focuses on literature from around the world that testifies to political or social injustices, and, through the act of testifying, poses some form of resistance. In reading fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry, students will look atmany of the issues that surround the act of bearing witness: the erasure of identity and the break of narrative sequences that adheres in surviving and/or observing traumatic historical events, and the healing (both cultural and individual) that can come through bearing witness. A World & Ethnic Literature course.

• 5. (DANG it!!) I just figured out that the Philosophy course I wanted has a prerequisite I haven't taken. #5 ... to be determined.

Here it comes ...