New year, new car. New to me, anyway. A royal blue 2001 Honda Civic with 95,000 miles on it. It's in perfect shape, and clean as a whistle. I'm still a little in shock that I actually bought it yesterday--I thought G and I were just going to check and look, and, you know, browse...but there it was, and my old Geo Prism has been making ominous noises for a while now, plus the power steering's pretty much shot, plus the frame rattles like a rainstick whenever I get behind the wheel, plus I can't see out the back window and the radio and tape deck are both dead...

So, I celebrated the new year with a lttle consumerism. I had hoped my next car would be a Prius, but they are still too expensive.

Many new poems--four or five in the last week, thank you, God. My poor family and friends have been inundated with emails, but they respond enthusiastically, so I have no motivation to stop.

Last week: a little head cold which was a drag--no swimming for seven days--my muscles have turned to mush. I feel much better today so will hit the pool, hopefully. Now I'm getting ready to go do yoga with Carla.

I read a book in Border's the other day while I was procrastinating working on an essay, called "Grow Younger Every Year." I'll save you the trouble of buying it for $20.00 or spending three hours reading it: exercise hard six days a week for the rest of your life. Especially after age fifty. It sounds a little brutal, but I'm convinced that's the secret to treating depression as well.

The "trouble" with exercising that much and that hard is that it does take over your life and rewire your brain in a way that's not usually associated with great literature, i.e. endorphins make me happy and goofy, rather than deep and intense. Proust wrote all his books while lying in bed, and never got any exercise. He was intensely creative, pretty miserable, and died young. Hmmm...

Getting ready to teach Memoir and Testimony this weekend. The hardest part so far has been thinking up assignments--students want to be told to write a paper, and some parameters about what kind of paper--I'm more interested in having them just digest all these different great writers and letting them inform their own work, but I bow to the human need for deadlines and set tasks.

There's an article in this month's Vanity Fair (I had a very productive procrastination session at Borders,) about the foster family Augusten Burroughs excoriated in Running with Scissors and how they were impacted by his portrait of them--brings up ethical questions about the whole genre, specially in the wake of the James Frey scandal. I'm going to copy it and bring it in to class first day.

Wa-hoo! Yoga!!