I’m home alone, and after giving up on a glacial Onegin (Ralph Fiennes and Liv Tyler), I was flipping through channels. I stumbled upon Disney’s High School Musical 2. I threw up in my mouth a little. I stopped flipping through channels and turned off the television.

Another day of sliding back into the real world: unpacking, storing, haircuts, errands, watching the new Harry Potter movie.

Also, a charming little movie, Thunderpants, from NetFlix, featuring Rupert Grint and released the year after Sorcerer’s Stone. We highly recommend it. If it were not for a couple of profanities released by Ned Beatty’s character, it would be a great daycare movie. The main character, Patrick Smash, has an enormous flatulence problem, and his only friend is Allen A. Allen (Grint), a super-nerdy genius who has no sense of smell. It plays as if it were written by Roald Dahl.

9 days to go.

You would think, with ten days to go in the countdown, I’d be feverishly working on something.

Alas, the fact is that I stayed up till 2:30 a.m. finishing Deathly Hallows, and today I had to clear the living room of my packing crates. My brain is still trying to reconcile that I’m not in the Land of PDM any more. These are my streets I’m walking down, my bed I’m sleeping in now, not some bizarre facsimile, and it’s still not right.

The brain rebels. That curious feeling I noted before, of a sense of unreality as I walked through the campus, I have now identified: it was relief. Now, I sit in my club chair in the living room, looking out onto College Street, wondering what Roger’s last name is so I can call him to come fix the air conditioner in my attic study, wondering what I’ll do tonight. There is no concert. There is no culminating event. There is not a steady stream of people barging in on me, asking my opinion or giving theirs. There is no laughter from the lobby, no memory of some wonderful class I’ve seen today, no anticipation of tomorrow’s events. I have to deal with the openness of reality.

Feh.

It’s far too hot to work in my study, so any extended creative work is out of the question for the moment. I could go for a walk with my music Moleskine (remember that passage in my life?) and try to come up with more songs for Day in the Moonlight, or begin sketching out the symphony. But my brain won’t work.

Perhaps tomorrow.

As you can imagine, the day after a fire closes your Fine Arts building is a bit busy. As fate would have it, damage was minimal and confined to Sawyer Theatre, so after gathering all the fine arts majors in the Old Gym, we were able to release everyone to go their regular classroom, give or take the dance majors.

Power was still off in Whitehead Auditorium, so no orchestra, so no “Milky Way.” That was disappointing.

I did get to go over “Dance” again with the bassists and marimbist. I think they’re going to do quite well, and the piece should be well-received. The boys certainly seem to like it.

This afternoon the vocal majors had their Rotunda concert, in which they fill the dome of West Hall Rotunda with glorious a capella music. Tonight the art exhibit opened, and it’s quite good. I’ll try to go back tomorrow and take some photos to share.

In the meantime, here are some Hogwarts photos from last Saturday:

First of all, me in complete Snape drag.

The whole Hogwarts gang [Sibyl Trelawney, Minerva McGonagall, Albus Dumbledore, Rita Skeeter, Gilderoy Lockhart, Moaning Myrtle, Harry Potter, Rubeus Hagrid, Nymphadora “Don’t Call Me That!” Tonks, and Severus Snape.]

Albus Dumbledore in the lobby of our dorm.

Sibyl Trelawney. Notice the sherry bottle. She wandered around the dining hall, incanting predictions.

Hagrid arrives in the lobby. Dave has neither read the books nor seen the movies.

Myrtle and Rita pose at the head table.

Myrtle, Rita, and Harry chow down while flashes are going off all around them. Quoth Myrtle: “I could get used to being famous.”

Gilderoy Lockhart, posing, as usual, with his new book, Yes, It’s Me! He also handed out bookmarks and coerced students into having their photos made with him. Chris actually made most of this outfit since last summer’s Hogwarts event. (Nadine, who was Mrs. Weasley last year but elected to be our photographer this year, has sworn that she will have a pink wool suit by September and be ready for Delores Umbridge next summer.)

Prof. McGonagall and Tonks at the head table.

Dumbledore with some of his fans.

Most of the head table.

A Soc Stud gets sorted. This one was Slytherin. All the best people, you know.

This Spanish major is one of our speakers for Convocation this Saturday. Notice her crossed fingers. Also notice, in the background, Gilderoy posing for a photo with a student.

At the Grand Ball on Sunday night, some of the kids were laughing at themselves, saying that on their MySpace page, “You Know You Belong at Nerd Camp,” they needed to put “… if your teachers dress up like Harry Potter characters,” followed by, “…and you think it’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.” They said this as they were filling out their dance cards in preparation to spending their evening dancing the waltz, foxtrot, and English country dance. Indeed.

We’re getting into that phase of the program when my duties start to pile up. Just like at the opening, my “free time” is spent getting paperwork done and the stars aligned for an easy exit for everyone.

I have noticed something, as I’ve walked around campus. Often I will be struck by a very real sense of unreality, that is, somehow I’ve fallen into an alternate reality. Very PDM.

This is not to be confused with a dream state. It doesn’t feel as if I’m dreaming. It feels as if I’m walking down the street in Newnan, perhaps, or down my hall at home, and yet everything around me is this other place. Perhaps I should say it feels as if I should be walking down the street in Newnan, and yet here I am.

This is curious in so many ways. For one thing, other than my family and my kitchen, what is there in Newnan that have even half the allure of this campus during the summer? What would I be walking down the street in Newnan toward?

As I often do at times of transition, I check my computer calendar for what’s coming up next, mapping out the next few months. Library training, preplanning, school opens… and then nothing. My calendar is absolutely blank after August.

Yes, I know, it will fill up pretty quickly, with Masterworks, social occasions, perhaps even Lacuna getting back to work on William Blake if someone steps up to head the organizing committee, but in general one can appreciate why being yanked out of this alternate reality back into the regular time/space continuum can be a bit of a drag.

I thought I would whip out another melody for Moonlight today, but I didn’t. I got caught up in PMD duties, specifically getting ready for the All-Campus Chorus this weekend.

The family’s still here, and so I’ve devoted my free time to them. (And the blog was down.)

No, honest, this is it. From here on out, I will have something to show for most days. Probably.

It’s the Friday of the first full week of GHP, and the faculty always celebrates in the lobby after minors. (The fact that we actually have to work Saturday morning is irrelevant.) It’s great to see everyone relaxing, snacking, talking, and in general having a great Pan-Dimensional Mouse of a time.

There was nothing on the calendar for the evening, which meant that technically after supper I should have had hours and hours to sit down in my apartment here and work on something. But you know what? Celebration of a task well-accomplished is too important to shut down.

Not only that, but for me to have come into my apartment and closed my door in order to get work done would have been seen as a serious exclusion of my happy faculty. Some would begin to worry about me, damned blues, while others would have been offended that I didn’t care to party with them.

I might have left my door open, but that’s the sign that anyone is welcome to barge in and meet/talk/play. I’m one of those people who take a good 20 minutes to get into the flow, and who among us believes that flow would happen with intermittent interruptions of happy faculty?

So I bagged it all and had a good time with my faculty. Tomorrow is another day, and I know that the happy faculty will either be going home, going to a movie, or taking long naps. I can work then, after I take my nap.

Creative product today? Minor registration day? At GHP?

It is to laugh.

My job on the first Wednesday of the Governor’s Honors Program is to sort 700 children into their first or second choice of a minor, the class in which they will spend the rest of the summer every afternoon. That’s 700 pieces of paper I must touch at least six times each: collecting, dividing into preselected and non, shuffling, sorting into first choices, counting, redeploying overages, and counting again. Repeat the last two steps until every class is within its limit and every child has his first or second choice.

And after that, I have to type in all 700 choices into the database. The whole process takes about five hours. At 9:30, I have to print out three copies of the list and take them to the dorms. I do not post them. I dump them with the RAs on duty and leave.

Then, at 10:30 pm, I have to call down students whose forms were not filled out correctly and put them in whatever class is still under its limit. And then I have to make the adjustments in the computer and print out rolls for the teacher. This year I made it to bed at midnight.

The only thing even close to being creative I did today was to attend Cinema GHP, which showed Casablanca as the first movie of the summer. Just to witness the perfection of that movie is a creative act.

As predicted, I have nothing to show for today. As the program gets under way, little things start to pop up, all those potholes or cave-ins in the road that one simply does not notice as one surveys the glorious landscape over which one is about to travel. This is not even taking into account the ambushes from hostile indigenes.

53 days to go.