Ah Thursdays.

For a long time, Thursdays have been my favorite day. Mitch Albom and Morrie can be Tuesday people all they want, but I'm definitely a Thursday girl. I no longer live in the halcyon days of the Thirsty Thursdays of college and graduate school or in the golden evenings of grading papers while chuckling at Friends with the Manda, but Thursdays are still pretty good.

Tonight, I'm alone. I'm not alone often these days, and alone must be qualified (alone with the dog, two cats, and a partridge in a pear tree), but the dog is nailing peanut butter in his kong and the cats are having their nightly cat meeting, so it's as close as I get, and I like it. Gerry is out to dinner with a friend who might one day be a boss, and he won't be home for a while. For all intents and purposes, I'm as zen as my life gets. A little My Name is Earl, a little Gray's Anatomy, and nothing to worry about until Monday.

Although I work tomorrow, I've carefully crafted my semester so that, in Professor Richard's classes, on Friday we read. I've come to enjoy wearing jeans, sitting indian style on my lecture table, and chatting about books with students just learning that they can be fun.

Background: In developmental writing, I am surrounded by reluctant readers. I discovered, through trial and error, that many of my students are actually frightened of books. So being the caring professor I am (though they would call me sadistic) I make them free read every week. Just 25 pages, anything they want.

They are always nervous at first. They are terrified they will pick the wrong book and look at me aghast when I suggest tossing it out and choosing something else. Are there people out there who feel obligated to finish any book they start? That's amazing to me. The only way I ever finish a book is by allowing myself to start a half dozen completely different ones at the same time so I never run the risk of getting bored. Even then, there are many I bet are on permanent hiatus.

Anyway, tomorrow is chat about your books day. I'm constantly amazed at the range of books my students choose. A football player from one of the worst school districts in Boston chose to tackle The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (pretty good read) and a wealthy international student from a private school in Geneva chose a fairly gruesome work on serial killers. I never know, but I agree with Oscar Wilde who says, "It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it." I love that I see my students' other sides, be they dark or light.

And they do read them. I once thought I was being hosed when a student chose Beowulf (required reading in high school english here) until he came tearing into class one morning screaming, "There's a DRAGON in here. Where the hell did the dragon come from?!?" which I remember being my first reaction on getting towards the end.

Another time, a student ran behind my car just as I was pulling out of my parking space just to give me a book. He'd read it and it reminded him of something I said in class -- the previous semester. It sits in a proud place on my bookshelf. That's what makes teaching worthwhile.

So far, it's only happened once. But once was enough to keep me going for a year..... at least.

Like my students, I managed to trudge my way through 25 pages of my "assigned" book this week. Even though Phantom looked invitingly shorter, I dove into Jane Eyre and am liking it immensely. So far, it's sort of like watching Jerry Springer or reading the first 25 pages of a Harry Potter novel. Jane's suffering in a comparable situation. What is it about so many British novels that depict such horrid upbringings? I understand the literary device of home - away - home again, but I also can't help wondering what being a kid in Britain is like that breeds such a common device in so many of its writers. Perhaps Jane was hoping to wake up with magical powers on her 11th birthday.

One thing I had forgotten (or it didn't make so much of an impression on me in earlier readings) is that Jane is immediately separated from her adopted family, the only peers we have met so far, because she is a reader. Within two pages, we see her sneak off to a secluded bay window behind a curtain to lose herself in a book. Although I was never an orphan and although my parents encouraged reading, I know from furtive glances I've received all my life, comments from friends and partners, some of the feelings she's having. Sometimes, books are preferable to reality. Call it our drug that doesn't tax the system or cause us to wreck our car (although there was that one time when I was listening to Primal Fear after midnight as I cruised into the dark Georgia night on my way to Alabama..... but surely that was an isolated incident).

Bronte makes reference, through Jane, to a concept called "fellow feeling" meaning that we are drawn to those most like us and repelled by those we can't understand. I know opposites are supposed to attract, but I wonder if Bronte didn't have the right of it, at least in most circumstances.

So now, Gray's Anatomy is over, the animals are settling in for the night and, like Jane, I must go find myself a secluded spot to be, at least for a little while, alone. Yep. I'm a Thursday girl.