Uneven pigtails and Inquisitive Beavers

It's a carnivalesque atmosphere here in the computer lab, in the 10th week of Fall Semester 2005. Graduate students have collectively given up on academic rigor, and have given into burlesque (it's an "esque" day) cavalierism.
And I have no idea what any of those words meant, or if they go together.
Those dissertating (a word?) are a bit hysterical; those teaching have given up on their students. A check of my own roster seems to indicate that five of my 19 students have withdrawn. That explains the lack of attendance.
At least there are fewer papers to grade.
Is it my fault? Not likely. Yes, I've been sick for a few days, and was being the binary opposite of the Energizer Bunny the weeks before that, but here in week 10--White Sox breaking a curse, NFL taking over downtime discussions--everyone seems to be faltering. I'm glad it's not just me.
The Burke paper remains unfinished. My focus is that of a fish. A three second memory.
I cancelled conferences this morning, and asked the students to email me their stuff before noon. Half of them did so. Not bad.
It was surreal riding the bus in the daylight, wearing messy pigtails and my 2003 Witmarsum sweater with the reporter-beaver on the front. Witmarsum: A town in Friesland, Netherlands; birthplace of Menno Simons.
Witmarsum Reporter: Bluffton College [sic] student. With poised pen and Professional Reporter's Notebook on the track of something like truth (which "makes free").
God, I miss being an undergrad. I miss Gerald telling me that there is something like truth about God in all that theory. "Logos!"
Teaching started out good. I think I need to return to a rhetorical construct for this. Rhetoric grounds me in that there are heuristics, ways of categorizing, the world is ordered into ethos, logos and pathos. And the deconstructionist's voice who is situated in my right frontal lobe is not silent, but quenched by a pragmatism for a moment. Truth doesn't matter. What matters is what we see as action and re-action to texts.
So Monday I will frame our little attendance problem as a rhetorical situation. Together we will do a pentad on the computer screen. We've never done a pentad before, but teaching by osmosis like that sometimes worked. It did for me, when Gerald would rant at me during dinner about church history, post modernity and Anabaptism, and the rhetorical constructs that make up our language. Lacan goes with the cross. Foucault explains the gate of heaven.
I don't know how anymore. But it worked back then.