Take me out to the ballgame

We (my academic 'team') are moving this week and this is giving me the opportunity to tidy up my desk a bit. My desk is not very 'tidy' because I am always shuffling through some ridiculous amount of paper related to tutoring at Birmingham, my studies, or teaching at Middlesex. I have not done a good job of keeping everything separate and I keep thinking to myself, well, this might be useful in the future. I threw away a bunch of paper, consolidated a couple of files. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Today I have spent no time reading, but my desk looks great and I finally know where everything is, more or less.

When I moved to this desk, I taped the note you see above next to my computer screen to remind me of what I did before I was a student. I taught 'Take me out the ball game' to high school students. I spoke and students repeated after me. I'm happy that I don't have to do this anymore and I taped the note up to intimidate myself a little — if you fuck this up, you gotta go back to teaching stuff like this. Anyway, I took it down in the move and I don't think I will put it back up at the new desk. I am a little bird that, after falling for a couple of hundred feet, has started to fly a bit. And it's looking less and less likely that I am going to hit the ground. At least not this time.