Top 3 Theories of What Happened to Tim

1. Swallowed by the academic beast.

2. Wandering the frozen Great Lakes.

3. Bound and gagged in front of his computer monitor.

The truth, though, is far less exotic. As some of you probably know, Robin has been struggling with a serious, chronic illness, and went through a particularly rough patch starting in July. I had to postpone going to Toronto to start my job there. Things have gradually, though slowly, gotten better, enough so that I've gone up to Toronto to start teaching; for the moment I'm commuting back to Chicago every weekend. (Air Canada still feeds you in flight, for anyone who's keeping track of such things.)

So the blog, which had already been staggering a bit, totally fell by the wayside; which wasn't helped by the fact that once I decided I was going to Toronto in January I had to rush to finish and file my dissertation by the end of December. Which, I am pleased to report, was successfully done, so you can call me Dr. Blog.

Starting the new job has been terrifying, exhausting, and exhilarating. I'm teaching two courses--one called Reading Poetry, a "gateway" course for the English department that is more or less a survey of poetry and how to read it; and another on Asian North American (i.e. Asian American and Asian Canadian) literature. I really socked it to myself in the latter course by teaching three Canadian writers right off the bat (Joy Kogawa, SKY Lee, and Bharati Mukherjee--well, an ex-Canadian writer, in the third case), but it turned out to be an excellent way to plunge right in to the eerily-familiar-yet-just-different-enough-to-be-interesting world of Asian Canadian politics and culture.

The teaching itself has been great fun, even if on a weird schedule: I'm teaching two nights a week in three-hour blocks, and even as much as I like to talk it's hard to stay upright and coherent for that long. And thus far I've really been enjoying Toronto, weather and all; traveling between there and Chicago basically just means varying the heights of the piles of snow.

This blog first started when I had an office of my own and long stretches of time sitting in it. Well, I'm doing the same again; we'll see what happens.