Float like a Butterfly

My classmate’s husband works at the Museum of Natural History, and she was generous enough to ask him to rustle up some free passes to the current butterfly exhibit for Just and me. Maybe because it was such a picture-perfect fall day, or because I had just come from annotating a 12-page John Ashbery poem, but the butterflies (sealed in display cases and fluttering in their humid glass room) seemed like the most deliriously pretty things on Earth. Two of them, brown with circular markings, made me want to drop everything and take up a career in textile design.







Ain't they purdy? Sorry, by the way, about the infrequent posts lately. I'm trying to make up in photos what I don't have time to produce in words. I’m also working really hard at the moment to impose some kind of structure on my week: school time (reading, tutoring, classes, commuting, and attending the occasional lecture or conference) and non-school time (everything else). So far, it’s working—well, sort of. I’ve gotten into a fairly comfortable 6:30 a.m. tea-and-books routine, and I try to make some time for dinner (Trader Joe's frozen tomales and shrimp must have been invented by an enterprising grad student) and the occasional non-school book; right now I'm reading Cold Comfort Farm, an enormously hilarious novel that you should buy this instant if you don't already own it. In terms of sheer funniness it ranks up there with A Confederacy of Dunces.