100 Words --- I finished the leftover buttermilk chicken from yesterday, ate the little salad, splashed ranch dressing on my glasses, and am half-way through the remainder of lunch, room temperature strawberry-flavored yogurt (with an emphasis on flavored), and I was amused at yesterday's random blog, 100 words on whatever. So caught between too many papers, too little time, patches of blue sky mixed with cloud outside my window, and the need for a mental lunch break, I poise over my 100 words. Could this be a long sentence linking impressions of students, hopes and anxieties, but steady progress? A preparation for getting all those critical projects done, including an annual self-appraisal I have little desire to write? A meditation on the meaning of Job (yes, the Biblical Job, which according to Wikipedia means "hostility"; there's a new take on the relationship between Job and God), or an understanding of Lord Byron (finally, a rationale to understand this man who offends me so deeply (a womanizer and brilliant poet who created his identity as the outsider, an ostracized and lonely creative genius), truly unloved yet perpetually seeking love, an entirely new category of Romantic, the Byronic hero, a very dark hero, mysterious, unknowable, and essentially dead at 37 of his own excessive lust. Or do I write the opening vignette for my next novel? Ah, I hit over 100 words. Time to go back to work. --Beth