Mr. Mann

I just want to go on record saying I don't think that faculty should be allowed to use the rec center. Not so much the rec center itself, but the locker rooms at the rec center. I don't think any student should have to see his or her professor's penis and/or vagina.

On a completely unrelated note, Ed is back. That makes me happy. Actually, I guess he never really left, but Ed now has a desk right next to mine, so I'll be seeing him on a regular basis. "Who is Ed?" you ask. Well, I'll tell you. Ed is in his forties or fifties I would wager. He grew up in Washington or one of those small towns near here and he's played in bar bands all his life. He's travelled all over the south and played with all sorts of Blues and Southern Rock people. Ed also writes. Boy does he ever. In a creative writing class where everybody else is turning in stories that are four to seven pages long, Ed will turn in twenty to thirty page monstrosities. That's not to say that they're bad. They're just heavy. Huge Faulknerian sentences, references to Dante and Moby Dick, pages and pages of description. Flashes of brilliance everywhere. And then there's Ed's demeanor. We'll say he's a bit grizzled. He has a beard off and on, wears a sleaveless blue jean jacket when it gets colder. You can tell he's done some living. But he's such a nice guy. He talks about all these deep concepts and ideas, but also has a sort of childlike innocence sometimes and often lacks confidence. He's always willing to give or ask for advice from anyone who happens to be around. Yesterday, he helped one of the other instructor's students for a good half hour. He took the guy from a boring, cut and dry story about why he likes Harry Potter to what sounds like it'll be a really good, really deep paper. Then he told me about his thesis. It relates Hucklebery Finn to Moby Dick, some Faulkner stuff, and the concept of rivers in Southern and world mythology. It's a pretty gargantuan undertaking. But he'll probably pull it off. Not because things come easily to him. They don't. He has to work really hard to reign himself in and be coherent. But because he'll make it work eventually. He'll talk to everybody he needs to talk to. He'll humble himself and let professors who are his age or younger give him advice and rip his writing apart. Ed has no pretensions, no pride. He's just Ed. And I'm glad to have him back.