winter hit philadelphia with a vengeance this week. it snowed, on and off, from monday to wednesday, and as thursday dawned the temperatures dipped into negative numbers on the farenheit scale. you can tell how cold it is outside from people's postures as they walk down the road -- in temperatures that frigid there is a particular stoop to ones gait, the shoulders hunch like a pugilist. everyone is covered, anonymous. when you're outside, the world narrows to the thin slice between here and where you want to be, and all the periphery is blasted inconvenience.

---

whether or not there's truth to the myth that the cold makes you hungry, it certainly seems true for me. when i have cereal or a sandwich before i leave the house in the morning, i'm usually ravenous before 11. i have 2 unhealthy fixes for this: (1) snack, or (2) wait till 9-ish to eat breakfast, and then get something with cheese. the same thing happens when i have salad for lunch -- i love gia pronto to death, but it leaves me starving long before dinner. damn winter.

---

i'm spending a lot of time in van pelt instead of the lab. mark's cafe is quiet early in the day, abandoned by sleep-phase-shifted undergraduates until "morning" (11-1) classes let out. i think i'm being productive, at least some of the time. everything moves with such painful slowness in research that writing -- even at the lumbering pace of 1000 words a day -- seems like explosive progress. this is another one of my (multiple) grouses with people who do surveys -- mountains of data in obscenely short times, but surely there's at least some inverse relationship between utility and ease of acquisition? truth just can't be that simple to come by; there has to be sweat and tears and burning and sleepless nights.