Let's get into it.

We've been together for a long time now. When I think about the post we've already shared, I can hardly believe there's only been one post so far. The post has really flown by! And that's why I feel comfortable getting into sticky issues, like politics and religion, knowing you'll read with understanding and compassion even if I rant a little. I don't feel like I have to stick with posting pictures of Abbie just to avoid alienating you.


Politics and religion, though. Whew. Now that I know I can talk about them, I sort of don't want to. Not that you can avoid them completely. But today, helping Abbie with her kiln in the art classroom, was a day full of strange and possibly toxic fumes, and staring at red-hot metal, and listening to children cry and sing and yell "Miss Brandao" so often that the words became alien, stranger even than usual. I forgot things all day, which I guess you usually do but don't notice. So it seems like politics and religion can wait.

Instead I'll just briefly mention corn. Some of my college friends made a movie about it, and I've been reading a book about it, and it's pretty darn political and religious for a lot of people. I'm staying personal, so I'll just say that thinking about corn makes me feel like an amoeba. Do you remember when you first saw one? Moving around on a slide on a video your middle school biology teacher showed because she was maybe too tired to talk to you that day? It stuck out its little pseudopod at whatever was nearby and just absorbed it. I still can't get over that. It pushes out that little piece of itself, and then surrounds the thing and all of a sudden it's over and the amoeba is slightly larger and the thing is gone. Watching that happen, and thinking about all the stuff that enters my body and becomes me, not only the things I choose to eat but also the fumes I breathe in and the things I bump into and the stuff - all the stuff! - that I don't even know about and, apparently, quite a lot of corn... well, it adds an interesting twist to all of my questions about identity. If I asked an alien scientist the old "who am I" question, and it told me I was mostly corn, should I be more or less likely to go to graduate school?

Thanks, to all of the atoms that compose you at the moment, no matter where they've been, for stopping by. Here's a poem to wash the taste of that idea away.


Iowa, January


In the long winter nights, a farmer's dreams are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrow.


Robert Hass