You have to keep your eye on the job because words are very sly, the rubbishy ones go into hiding and you have to dig them out—repetition, synonyms, things that simply don’t mean anything.
[Isaak Babel]

I am unpacking my suitcase from the trip to Ithaca (which has confused my geographic sense; just now I almost wrote my college address on a return envelope). I am also putting away things for the summer (food, clothes, my Durham life) and sorting papers that never got sorted during the semester (not as bad as you’d think; only one corner of the room is covered, and none of the stacks are higher than an inch). As I wandered from the kitchen to my computer and then to my closet, though, I had a moment of recognition: I am fast at certain kinds of thinking, occasionally. And at reading fantasy novels, and memorizing poems, and walking. And at making friends, and scrambling eggs, and falling in love.

Everything else comes slow to me. Cleaning my room is a process during which seasons turn; I make decisions at the speed of glaciers. But that is okay. It is not speed that makes life worth living.