Leaving MIT

Only another week of classes.  The end is in sight.  I'll probably get the grade sheets Monday. Then we pack and leave . . . sort of.  In a way, the move is simpler than usual, since it's a matter of choosing between stuff that goes back to Florida and stuff we give away or toss.  Nothing stays.

Which translates, of course, into an apartment full of boxes, which Gay and our dear friend Jag are right now filling and refilling and eventually taping and consigning to Railway Express.  No, that's Pony Express.  No, Big Brown Truck Express.

Although we love Boston, I can't say it will be difficult to leave.  I want to get back to "real" life.  Even though it's the difference between a salaried high-status position and being a money-grubbing freelancer. 

No longer An MIT Professor.  It's attractive, in a non-mysterious way.

I want to go back to normal life, the writing life.   The morning-dark porch and oil lamp and fountain pen – which nowadays is more like the porch on the coffee house on the corner in broad daylight.  I've allowed myself to grow soft, with the steady income and legitimacy of the MIT job.  Now I go back to the open market.

After the holidays settle down, I may try to get back into that groove:  go to bed early and get up around four, and work in the morning darkness and silence.  Quit around nine or ten and nap for awhile.

My current regimen in Florida came out of desiring regular exercise – I'd bicycle eight or ten or twelve miles before settling down to write.  In the past several years, I've moved out of the darkness  . . . I do work before dawn, but it's non-writing stuff, in my office at home.  When it starts to get light, I get on the bike and go a few miles to a coffee house and start writing.

But it's not really that much exercise.  Maybe I have to revise things so that I incorporate gym time into the routine.  Maybe write in the dark of the morning and go off to the gym when the sun comes up.

(I hate to do this, because my "self-image" is of someone who gets plenty of exercise in the normal course of the day.  But in fact the scale, sadly, says otherwise.  I have to eat less or exercise more.)

Whatever, it will be an interesting new chapter to open.  Have to finish this one first, though.

Joe