Let Us Eat Cake

My left foot is sore and tender this morning.  I spent much of yesterday on my feet, so perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise.  It was a surprise to spend so much time on my feet.  I spend most days at work having to remind myself to get up and move occasionally; yesterday made up for at least several of those sedentary days.

We had a corporate team on campus to look at our files and documents that we're preparing for our accreditation visit.  As a result, I spent a lot of time going back and forth between my office and the conference room to get items requested.

In between, we had a birthday cake.  "We have a lot of cake here," said one of my colleagues to a woman who just started her job with us two weeks ago.

I said, "I’ve eaten more birthday cake since I started this job than I’ve eaten in all of my adult years put together.”  That's not exactly true--my last workplace celebrated birthdays too, but only of the academic management team, so we had less cake.

It is good to be at a place with cake, although I should get up and move more often--having days more like yesterday--if I'm going to eat that cake.

I thought about how much I like my current workplace and colleagues, and how lucky I am.  As the day moved along, I thought about a possible short story, for my group of short stories that revolve around the people at a for-profit arts college.  It would be the last story, titled "The Afterlife," and it might be a collection of nuggets from people who have moved on from the school. And then, at night, I thought of the endings of classic books, something along the lines of “And I alone survived to tell the tale.” I thought of Emily from Our Town, and of all the plotlines that have characters returning from death, so desperate are they to see their loved ones again, only to discover that once they’ve crossed over, they can’t really get back through the glass that separates the living and the dead.

This morning I played a bit with that idea, but I'm very early in the process.  Still, it's wonderful to keep getting ideas--even as I do wonder how I'll know when I'm done with the collection.