Am I A de Winter?

Do you remember the scene at the beginning of Rebecca where the heroine is just getting to know the seductively brooding Maxim de Winter? She tells him she's an orphan (they always make the best protagonists, after all), and that her father, when he was still living, was a not so successful painter, largely due to the fact that his sole subject was a single tree that he found particularly striking. She explains, maybe a little bashfully, that her father's philosophy was that if you found something perfect, you should stick with it. The way the anecdote was treated seemed to want viewers to find the father eccentric and charming, but maybe also acknowledge the impracticality and absurdity of this mindset. Being sixteen and a dutiful viewer, I did just that. What a totally stupid idea! I thought to myself. Who cares about trees, anyway!

I'm still not so sure why I remember this particular part of the film, but now that I'm amassing a collection of old postcards of similar style, I find myself sometimes thinking about this father and his tree, and am starting to realize we maybe have more in common than I initially thought. I guess I just mean that the idea of trying to reimagine the same subject or scene in a variety of different ways doesn't seem redundant or boring to me anymore. Now it just seems like a pretty nice challenge.

For A Potential Professor:

Three semesters maybe isn't enough time to have observed enough to know all that much about teaching, but surely it's long enough to be able to sense when students are reacting to the professor in ways that seem less than desirable. Is this how you act with your other professors? sounds too much like a rhetorical question, when really they might be wondering, waiting for some sort of answer.

But the trouble is, even if the problem is the students, it is still because of professor. There is something about their demeanor, apparently, that suggests that it is okay to complain to or confide in them, to be restless, childish, to be, well, whiney.
Your plan of wearing your glasses to class to appear more authoritarian now seems a little like someone slapping on Groucho Marx glasses to seem more serious. You still aren't exactly intimidating.

Not that intimidation is really the desired effect. But also, you most likely don't like having this problem simply because of what it entails: a whole new kind of self-consciousness. A nagging feeling of needing to change some fundamental part of your personality, and wondering, well really, how you could ever actually accomplish that.

I guess being a human entails that all the same.

Humble

I'm so tired at the end of each day. I try to resist the feeling that I'm being slowly swallowed alive into the next day where I find myself in the belly of a closed room while I wait out the day until I'm coughed out.

I would like to learn to look forward to each day. For a while, it seemed as if I was shifting to that but I'm weak.

Maybe I need a new tattoo to remind me of these things.