I can't breathe.

Man, why do I keep forgetting to take my allergy medicine before leaving the house? Right now, I want to cut off my nose and leave it off until all this pollen finishes doing what it's doing. Wednesday night I went to a dinner and reading for two of the creative writing faculty who are retiring, and this is what I learned: two late nights in one week make Kathleen a zombie for the rest of the week. I was dead tired when I woke up yesterday. I'm still tired today, but not as bad as yesterday. However, the food was good and I got to see some people I haven't seen in a few years. So, it was well worth the dark circles under the eyes.

I have the grand idea to start a creative writing club at my daughter's school. She's been writing books lately and I asked if the school had a writing club, and was surprised to learn that they didn't. Anyway, I thought, "I could do that." So I called the principal yesterday and offered up my services. I need to have a faculty sponsor for liabillty reasons, apparently. The principal said he'd send out a message asking for a volunteer. Needless to say, I'm hoping someone is willing to do it. They'd really only have to be present during club meetings. I guess to make sure I'm not teaching the kids to worship the devil or something. Actually, it makes me feel better to know they are trying to make sure the kids are always in a safe environment. However, if it's a go, that means I've got to learn about poetry over the summer. I'm a fiction writer who's never been much of poetry fan, so I don't really know anything about it. But if I'm going to try and help kids write the stuff, I guess I better figure out what I'm talking about. Luckily, my husband has studied poetry, so I hope to go through his books and get a better understanding of the mechanics of writing poety.

I had an interesting discussion with someone yesterday about the future of Notre Dame. Lately, the university is very much trying to reinvent itself as a major research university, which is not, in itself, a problem. However, in trying to further its research reputation, it seems there's been an increased challenge to the university maintaing its Catholic identity. This has happened, primarily, because you can't have the best research faculty in the world and think they're all going to be Catholic, or even unantagonistic towards Catholicism. Anyway, as it works out, the faculty seems to be getting more liberal and the student body seems tostill be pretty conservative. As I've talked about in past posts, a lot of people seem to think it's the role of the Church to remold itself in the eyes of the worshippers, which I think is crap. It'll be interesting to see how this all develops.