Still breathing

Twice I thought I was going to die last night.

I saw bright red berries captured in ice, and the slick blue-white of tundra-esque iced/snowed-over fields, and the amber glow of building windows and streetlights and moving cars from atop a hill, and my heart almost broke from the sheer beauty of everything. I thought, This is a reason to spare the world. I thought, This is the night I die, because it would be very much like a kind world to show me this kind of magic, a sort of visual last hurrah, before it snuffed me out.

And later, in my creative writing class, I almost had a panic attack because I saw the lights outside the classroom flicker out and I thought, Someone has cut the hall lights. They're going to start shooting us all up, because where else would a school shooting start if not in this building that so many desperately unhappy English majors hate, and I'm going to get a bullet between the eyes because I'm sitting directly across from the window. And I very nearly got up to stand in the corner for the rest of class, regardless of how awkward it would be, but then I saw some people walk by and realized it was only the lights of the classroom across the hall that had been turned off by the custodian.

Obviously, I didn't die, and better yet, the director of the IWP came to talk to our class and mentioned that the Facebook group I'd made for the effort to start a creative writing major here at my school was a big selling point for the administrative powers that be. This was especially heart-warming news, as that was my only lasting contribution to this campaign and the only thing I'd imagined it would achieve was to serve as an information center for interested students. Pimping it out like mad in all of my classes and likely annoying my professors served a purpose, after all.

No Chametzky sighting today. The world will only understand my glee about this man if it attends a linguistics lecture by him. He is brilliant and adorable and quite small, and he makes me think of lemurs and muffins-in-baggies whenever I see him.