David's sick, so no hang-gliding today. Dream last night that my father had fathered a black family, and so I had several black half-sisters whom I'd met in childhood but forgotten. One had not forgotten me, and she was angry that I had forgotten her. A whole "shadow family"--as if my real family weren't big enough!

The dream also featured a young, black child telling me that the word "defunct" has now been revamped into a positive expression, meaning "de-funked." New trend in street slang--you read it here first!

I turned the last blog into an essay, printed it out, revised it five times, put it in an envelope and sent it to The Sun. DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME! Now I regret having done that. It could be way better. This is one of my worst faults; impatience, wanting to turn something into a product before it has had enough time to be a process yet. Skipping over the process part, as if I didn't know by now that the process is the reward. But sometimes I still don't know that, even though I've only been remindedof the lesson 100,000 times.

I'm reading There Is No Me Without You, by Melissa Fay Greene, about the AIDS crisis in Ethipia, and African orphans. It's ripping my heart out by the tendons. I definitely want all my students to read this book.

I also thought of another book I LOVE and want everyone in America to read, Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Some--that could count as a memoir too, but then there would be two memoirs set in Africa--would that be so bad? A third book I love and will probably include is The Color of Water by James McBride, about his Jewish mother who had twelve African American children by two different husbands and made sure every single one of them went to college while working factory jobs herself. Hmm, do we sense a theme here?