Mysteries of life

1) How is it possible that senior English majors, on the cusp of graduating, don't know how to write an analytical paper?

2) Or, in some cases, a sentence?

3) Why is Henry Vaughan so much less interesting to me than all the other devotional poets? I mean, he's got the same issues, formal inventiveness, and even a bit of Royalist frisson. But it's like eating cream of wheat, as opposed to Donne's Tom Kha Tofu and Herbert's souffle and Crashaw's (....um....blood pudding seems too easy....how about:) dark-chocolate-dipped fresh ginger root. I like cream of wheat. A lot, in fact. But it just doesn't seem as satisfyingly substantial.

4) Why have housing prices tumbled everywhere but in the neighborhood where I'm buying out Kids'FabDad for half the equity? Ouch.

5) Am I displacing my academic and personal anxieties onto Barack Obama's campaign? Feeling better about my life through his progress?

6) How much time is it going to take to get my [Foreign Language] fluency back to fighting trim? And when am I going to have that time?

7) What on earth to do with a 26-page poem?

8) Am I ever going to climb out from under all this teaching so that I can a) produce a conference paper by April 3, and b) get back to the book WIHMD?

Sadly, none of these questions are rhetorical.