In its idiomatic use, we transfer the noun sense from the object itself to the regard for the object. That is, in the idiomatic use, the attraction to the object is the fetish, so in my particular instance the paper is the object of the fetish. Just thought I'd clear that up, because Merriam-Webster online does not.

Anyway. Yep. Lined or unlined, a notebook or a legal pad, a new ream of paper for the printer or a single sheet of cheap foolscap (and we shall not even mention the powerful allure of a fresh pack of lined index cards, supremely yet frugally competent) -- any writing paper within sight calls to me to decorate it with words, to convert the potential of that great clean space into whatever potential is best converted to. Seeing the blank page inspires fear in some; in me, it elicits hope. It is shrink-wrapped spring.

However, I am (both sadly and happily) evolving.

Monday at 8 AM Karen, who herds the faculty at the school, called to ask if I could be at the school in an hour to sub for three hours for a fallen comrade. Although I had planned to spend the morning grading some papers and posting an entry, I readily accepted, not only because Karen is one of the sweetest humans on the planet (and I say that not just because she is largely responsible for scheduling the lives of the faculty), and therefore I would do much to help her, but also because three hours of sub pay will cover a good bit of a textbook or two for Josh, and although we are certainly in no danger of missing any meals in this household, the word extra seldom precedes the word money here. The absent teacher had arranged to have both her classes view videos, so the job required only that I pass out a sign-in sheet, pop a video into a VCR, remove the video, collect the sign-in sheet, remind the students of their assigned reading and repeat this for the next class.

I am eminently qualified to perform those tasks. I can do them in my sleep, but it doesn't look good when I do, so as I passed through the office to pick up the videos, I snatched a new legal pad from the storeroom, thinking that I might draft an entry while running the videos for the classes.

There was much to say about this weekend, after all. After spending Saturday morning doing my penance in advance by laundering and then stringing about 120 feet of laundry outside to dry, and after taking care of other domestic crap, I had spent most of Saturday afternoon in the comfort of Josh's recently vacated room watching the much vaunted KSU football team stumble to a lackluster victory over Iowa. That Coach Snyder hadn't scheduled the local parks and rec beer league all-stars for the season opener was itself newsworthy.

There was news of the birthday dinner of corned beef that we had for Josh on Sunday. I might have written about how glad we were of the company, or I might have written that Taylor and I were equally glad to see our guests leave so that we might continue to cruise supine on the sofas through our Harry Potters.

I might have written about having to tell Owen and his buds (Alex, Daniel and Matt) several times to move the trampoline away from the garage. They were jumping onto the trampoline from the roof of the garage, a daring feat that I could appreciate enough to permit at least one try for each boy.

I could have confessed to having made some changes to the text of the previous entry while letting at least one real clunker of a sentence stand.

I had many worthwhile details and adventures to relate, but I sat there with a clean sheet of paper and a good, cheap pen, with plenty to talk about and no excuses, and what did I produce?

My freewriting, my brainstorms, my list making led nowhere. Stuck with just a pen and paper, I produced no lump of clay worth shaping. I doodled my signature a hundred times, trying to duplicate the John Hancock flourish a time or two. I sketched the horse-head line drawing that I learned from the John Nagy Show (from New York television of bygone years -- yeah, we had TV then, kiddo) when I was still a single-digit kid, back before that car up there was rolling off the line for the first time. I decorated the remaining nooks and crannies of a single sheet of paper with my Latin mantra from the Aeneid -- sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt (a loose transliteration: "there are tears for things, and things mortal touch the mind").

I spent sizeable bits and pieces of three hours trying to knock out an entry on a clean sheet of paper and couldn't do it, yet a day later I sat down at a computer, and thirty minutes later, here 'tis, for what it's worth.

Reading:
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third one. Harry has grown on me, and I'm compulsive, so I'll have to read all seven in the series as Rowling completes them. It has become so bad that next time I might have to wait in line at midnight. Have I mentioned that I called Tom Clancy once because I thought he was slacking between Jack Ryan episodes? Good, because I didn't, but I was tempted.

Watched:
(Sunday night) Grand Isle, a Kelly McGillis rendering of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, a short and elegant novel. The time required to view the movie is greater than the time required to read the book. A little cloying, the movie made me long for time to watch Tremors, just to clear my palate.

Weather:
The temperature here reached 109° F Monday, tying Lawrence (a town down the river from us) for the nation's high.