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I showed up for work on my first day of work and they didn 't even have an office for me. The writing center was just an empty classroom filled with just dirt and boxes and ladybugs. Ladybugs, which is actually an omen of good fortune , which is kind of interesting. And so I sat down at a computer I found in the library and I started typing and I typed a philosophy

In this world , there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding , predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along. -Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman Every now and then in our writing center staff meetings, I pile crayons, magic mark ers, colored pencils and a stack of white paper in the middle of the table. For the first fifteen minutes, the graduate student tutors draw pictures. There is no prompt beyon "draw a picture of a conference you're left thinking about from this week." Sometime the drawing time is silent. I watch the geographers and economists and women s studies scholars bite at their lips and furrow their brows as they work in an unfamiliar perhaps -forgotten medium.