Feast of Joy and Anguish

Merton reflects on the feast of the founding of the Gethsemane Chapel, and wonders "What in the world am I doing here?"   He then describes "any vocation is a mystery, and juggling with words does not make it any clearer."  Juggling is an interesting choice to describe the discursive practice that Merton uses in his writing.  I think it would be hard to describe juggling as anything but a kind of play, except perhaps for the professional juggler.
Teaching English and writing is a kind of juggler's practice...drawing attention to the different kind of objects that can be juggled.  Here's a poetically shaped pin, here's one that very dramatic, and then here's a straightforward prose object.  Start with a simple set, a subject and a verb, see if you can get the hang of it!
While I was rehearsing with one of the young women who volunteered to do a staged reading of David Mamet's first act of Oleanna last week, the insurance agent for the house in Toledo called.  It was an instance of life reflecting art.  In the play, the professor, John, is constantly being interrupted by calls from his wife or lawyer during a real estate transaction he is trying to accomplish in the middle of an interview with a student who is failing his course.  On Friday afternoon, we finally did the reading on the back stage in the Fine Arts Quad, and my confederate in the audience called my phone on cue throughout the reading.  That one piece of staged theatrics blurred the boundary between the real and the imaginary for the students who didn't realize that the phone call was coming from one of their classmates.  I think that some of the students were caught up in the drama, probably due to that one device.  They often think that they're too cool to be caught juggling.