I hear the trap snap shut; by the time I walk in from the next room, the little gray-brown mouse— fat from food he scrounged, like the chocolate cake uncovered that still has tiny footprints in the icing— those same little feet now scramble, desperate to push the trap away.
The trap doesn’t move; the little guy’s efforts quickly lose strength. His back legs kick, lifting his body and the trap together, but the weight is too much.
After a still moment, his legs stretch out again, this time much more slowly not even able to move the trap:
they just slide across the floor. His body is left outstretched, his head caught under the bar.
His eyes—squeezed out of his head, lifelike because they seemed to be looking at me but empty, black as death— look more like the ears of an iconic mouse than windows to any soul.
I signed up for classes the other day, and went ahead and signed up for a full courseload, even though I know that I’m technically not supposed to. they said that I am only supposed to take the classes that I need in order to graduate. and by talking about this on my blog, I guess I’m ruining my opportunities to plea ignorance should they give me a hard time next semester, when they realize I’m overstepping my bounds. the thing is, who am I hurting by taking these two extra classes? ideally, I will add to the classroom experience, right? right.the classes that I’ve registered for are as follows:
a class on vladimir nabokov, a superb russian author
my final russian course, which should thankfully be a review of the previous three semesters
the creative writing tutorial (one-on-one with a professor) in which I will either attempt to make serious progress on the novel-in-the-making “Never Enough” which I began during my first college semester or begin work on that children’s novel about a chipmunk
last but not least, I will be taking the “advanced” poetry class, perhaps again with the professor who is teaching my intro class this semester.
I’m pretty excited about all of that. I even had the pleasure of clicking the “notify of intent to graduate” button on the web interface, a pleasure that comes only once in the college career. this is it, I’m gonna graduate! awesome, I’ll start planning a party now so that everyone can come and bring me cards with tons of cash inside 😉
I have a new poem posted, but it’s been up for about a week, so if you haven’t read it already then you obviously don’t care anyway. and I’m considering adding a whole lot more pictures to the pictures page, so check back and see if I’ve managed that yet.
finally, take a look at the picture above. if you don’t know the story on it, here it is: this is a picture of the amount of sky that would be hidden by a dime seventy-five feet away from you. now imagine all of the stuff in this picture filling up the rest of the nighttime sky. that’s a lot of shit. now read my essay about space and quantum theory. I promise I’ll revisit the issue with a better-written essay sometime in the future. if I live that long…
