she spreads her love, she burns me up

I really should have gone to be right after I walked in the door an hour ago, but after go-go-going all day, I needed a few precious minutes of stupidity in front of the interwebs to unwind. My commute this morning was rendered ghastly by the rain and the general lack of infrastructure to handle more than 0.25" of water (case in point: the onramp that I usually take to get on the freeway was closed, forcing me to detour in search of another access point). However, I made it to work, where I slogged all day. I had a nice break in the form of lunch with Gyre; we traditionally have lunch every third Tuesday, and since Tuesdays happen to be baked potato day at my favorite cafe, I've probably eaten the same lunch with him approximately twenty times in the past year. I then continued my slog until 5:15pm, at which point I realized that I was going to be late for class if I didn't skedaddle immediately.

So I sped out of the office, drove through the nearest Taco Bell in search of some easy and deliciously bad sustenance, and furiously drove to Stanford, where I sat in the car to scarf down my baja chalupa before walking into class about four minutes late. Class was really good tonight, and didn't feel like it lasted for three hours; we spent the first segment doing mini-workshops of each other's stories from last week (which involved breaking into groups of three, reading each story, and critiquing them for ten minutes). My partners claimed to like my story, didn't think that my farm workers were overly cliched, and gave some helpful suggestions if I wanted to expand the story (which I probably don't, although I am curious what happens to the brothers). The other two stories in my group were really great too, and so I'm pleased to see that the other students are somewhat serious about this. That made for a great discussion of the reading for this week (the first half of Toni Morrison's "A Mercy"), and then we prepped for this week's writing exercise, in which I'm going to have to write a couple of pages from the point of view of a photographer during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. After class ended, I drove home, sat around for a bit as mentioned above, and now am going to go to bed.

However, I need to think of a longer story (~15 pages) to write for this class, and I'm a bit at a loss. I thought about writing about Iowa; I thought about writing about Ukraine or India (yes, so similar); and then I had this great idea tonight of writing about Madeleine's brother, who is a major figure in the Parisian underworld since I need to do some research for that anyway, but I don't want it to turn into too much of a ripoff of "Les Miserables". So, I'll have to keep thinking -- but I need to research over the next couple of weeks so that I can start writing before/while I'm in India, so I'm going to have to decide quickly. Perhaps the answer will come to me in a dream tonight; for now, it's time for bed!