My job is eating my life. If I were putting as much effort into it as I probably should be, I would spend every hour of every day doing paperwork. That, I have found, is the truth of teaching emotionally disturbed kids. It warps you into thinking that your students are so thoroughly your responsibility that everything else should take second, and when other things don't take second, the job becomes a pit of guilt.

I'm teaching at a high school in Coney Island that's in New York's District 75, the district that's set up to serve students with the kinds of disabilities that make learning anywhere else impossible. So far I've had a sociopath, a schizophrene, a couple of kids who've spent the better part of their childhoods in jail (one spent a whopping five years inside between the ages of 10 and 16). Sometimes they're delightful. Most of the time trying to get them to focus on anything short of their own hopelessness is, like Leo McGarry once said, like trying to get cats to march in a parade. (Lately I keep thinking to myself, oddly: what would Leo McGarry do?)

Other arenas are going far better than that. K. and I, for one. I've never found anyone I like as much.

I have a subscription to The New Yorker, which may not be quite on the same level of settledness as having a phone or a couch, but it'll do for now.

I have a couple good books to read. I finished His Dark Materials last week; read The Amber Spyglass in a little over a day. Thought the ending was a little too neat, and after having heard others complain about how nothing you want for the characters comes to pass, I was a little surprised at what happens with Father Gomez and Metatron and Ms. Coulter and others. Now I'm reading Brian Green's Fabric of the Cosmos, because I feel a craving for spacetime every now and then.

My TV obsession has shifted from The West Wing and Alias (unengaging and contrived) to Deadwood. I guess I like to hear people say "hooah" and "cocksucker." And also there was a great profile of the writer in (you guessed it) The New Yorker.

I guess there's no point in trying to catch you all up. I could tell you about selling my car, about Neff's birthday party, about going to MoMA for the first time in four or five years, about quitting smoking and starting smoking again, about humiliatedly missing %%diary-floodtide%%'s visit, about reconnecting with Elijah, about everything like that, but why don't we just start from scratch.