11:15 PM:

I'm getting really tired of this whole Trent Lott thing. Geez, people -- that is, those among you who are making a mountain out of a freakin' molehill -- there's no story here; all you're doing is making yourselves look dangerously stupid, and nurturing this country's worst Thought Police tendencies. Quit it.

(To pick but one of the many obvious flaws in the reasoning here... when was the last time anybody expected any presidential candidate to live up to his campaign platform? And yet all the people calling for Lott's head on a platter assume that he assumed that Thurmond would have successfully implemented every policy he proposed at the time. Please. I still think it might have been nice if Perot had won in '92; that doesn't mean I think things would have gone the way he promised they would...)

4:34 PM:

Sundown is upon us, so I don't have time for much of an update... the bright side of being out of the Ph.D. program is that the worst has already happened. I know I'm not actually gonna flunk my English Language class, so while my last paper isn't gonna be the greatest, it doesn't really matter. I'm done. In a weird sort of way, it makes me feel better about things.

And I may be seeing two of my sisters in the next couple of weeks! One biological, one not... Erin's gonna be spending Christmas in Michigan, and might be able to swing by my part of the state, and My-Sister-The-Writer is looking into the possibility of taking Greyhound here. (And my parents are reportedly consulting their Ouija board to see if they should let her go. Or, okay, they're writing a letter to a deceased rabbi and sticking it into a volume of said rabbi's correspondence at random, then reading the pages it ends up at to see what the answer is. This is not a normative Jewish practice; Lubavitchers are weird.) All of which is exciting, and also means that I really need to clean my apartment. (In particular, I need to dig out the couch; I'll need the extra bed if My-Sister-the-Writer makes it here.)

11:47 PM:

You know you're avoiding work when not only do you find yourself watching Dora the Explorer, but you find yourself interacting with it, giving instructions to the title character when she asks for them.

Not that I'm suggesting that this happened to me last week.

11:48 PM:

Classes are over! Less than a week to go!

All I have to do now is... well, do several weeks' worth of research in the next few days, and then turn in a 25-page report summarizing my findings on Monday. And grade all the final papers of my students by Tuesday. And then I'm done!

If you haven't noticed, I'm doing a lot better than I was at this time in the past two semesters.

This might be as good a time as any to write about what's coming up. Once I get done with school -- and not bothering to attend the M.A. graduation ceremony, because in my case, it'd be celebrating being thrown out of the program, and I really don't need that -- the immediate challenges will be to clean my apartment thoroughly, and to seek out and apply to a bunch of MFA programs. That should take me through the end of December.

Then comes the long-awaited Tour of the Country. I'm getting a 30-day rail pass from Amtrak, and traveling all over the place. There are three major goals here:

1. I want to check out possible places to live next year. I have no intention of staying in Ann Arbor or returning to New York City just yet, but haven't really seen much of anywhere else. So I want to check out the possibilities firsthand. Similarly, I wanna check out the grad schools I'll be applying to.
2. I want to see a bunch of friends. Furthermore, I want to meet a bunch of friends I've only typed to online -- and occasionally spoken to on the phone -- so far.
3. After the past three semesters, I can use a month off.

That said, while I can afford the train fare, and I figure I can afford to take the month off (I'm going in January specifically so that I'll be able to work from February onward without interruption), having to pay for lodgings would break my budget. Which is where Operation Futon Quest comes in.

Or to put it another way... if you live in a city Amtrak stops in, you may have the rare opportunity to put me up for a night or two! I haven't worked out the itinerary yet, but I'm almost certainly gonna be hitting Chicago, New York City, Dallas, Houston, and San Francisco. Next on the list in terms of probability are Vancouver and Boston, and, I dunno, quite possibly some other East Coast cities, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC. About the only corner of the country I'm not thinking of stopping by at this point is the southeast. (Sorry about that, Chris.)

I haven't yet worked out the order in which I'd be visiting these places -- by far the most significant factor will be working around Shabbos every week, for which it'd be easiest if I were in Ann Arbor, New York, or Chicago -- but I hope to figure that out by the end of December. So... if you would be interested in having me swing by your neck of the woods, and/or wouldn't mind letting me crash by you along the way, please e-mail me! You never know...

10:57 PM:

(Weekends may turn out to be my Achilles heel on this Holidailies thing. Sorry about that.)

I had this lovely moment earlier tonight, while walking home from college. I'd just finished four hours of seeing my students (I was scheduled for two, but their final paper of the semester is due tomorrow, and they were lined up through the hallway when I arrived, and I wasn't gonna leave until I'd seen everyone), and I was staggering home under the the weight of my overstuffed backback, when it dawned on me that I'd be completely done with the semester in a week. A few hours less than a week, even. Oh, it was such a lovely thought, one that caused me to rub my hands with glee.

Then I realized that today was Monday, not Tuesday, which meant that I still had eight days to go. I deflated. It doesn't seem as if one day ought to make much of a difference, but the semantic gap was a bit much.

In the meantime... enough research has been done on the English Language project to make me wish I'd been able to get started on it earlier, 'cause there are leads to follow, and nowhere near enough time to pursue most of them... still, the prognosis for getting through the semester intact is good. Yay!

Just a week and a day to go...