All Dressed Up With Nowhere to Go

Or at least that's how I feel. I'm all packed for Dragon*con now, save for getting some small miscellaneous items and errands taken care of. I'll be going to class, and I will be doing some work. (I'm not that obsessive... yet.) But otherwise... I'm essentially taken care of work-wise up until next Wednesday. Which wasn't easy... I read during my free time at work, read before I went to sleep at night... I read a lot. And wrote a good portion too. It's both sad and joyous to go through two pages of writing about a short story only to realize, in all the ensuing explication without any clear answer, that the main character is a Virgin Mary figure. Joyous because it's the very breakthrough that makes the reading response worth it. Sad because I have to rewrite the entire thing so that it more specifically heads in that direction, rather than vaguely meandering there.

Aristotle cracks me up. We're reading his Poetics, which is an exploration of tragedy and epic forms. There are some places where he's so plain, so didactic that it really helps, where he states the obvious and the obvious is precisely what you need. But there are other places where he has become somewhat dated.

"A beginning is that which itself does not follow necessarily from anything else, but some second thing naturally exists or occurs after it. Conversely, an end is that which does itself naturally follow from something else, either necessarily or in general, but there is nothing else after it. A middle is that which itself comes after something else, and some other thing comes after it."

"Suffering is an action that involves destruction or pain."

At least he defines his terms, I suppose.