Slowly, stealthily, spring is arriving. Friday was Dianne's exam, which was intensely boring, and then glorious release into the sunshine, and spring break. I did my time at the beaches as an undergrad, but as you grow older, there's a trick you can learn so that Cancun and the like become less geographical places, and more states of mind. Spring break -- whose origins, I am old, were in Ft. Lauderdale, 1885 -- is exciting not because of the exotic escapes, but because of its position in the narrative arc of the academic year -- it's the caesura right before the final swell towards finals, coinciding with winter's thaw and the symbolic renewal of the world. Its power comes from its situation in time, and the rest is a facade. Fortunately, one doesn't have to realise any of this to get drunk and sunburned and have the time of ones life.

I picked up a copy of The Time of Our Singing from Last Word on the way home -- my third (one went to Yen and the other is god knows where) -- and spent a while just reading random bits of it and having small prosegasms. I haven't read anything new for almost 2 weeks now -- on Wednesday I abandoned studying at about 10 and picked up The Tempest, which I've reread with unhealthy regularity since J2. More recently, I've begun to think of Prospero's magic as science (per Asimov's quote), which will be my way of keeping myself honest once I publish a few papers in Nature and win the Nobel Prize. (Right.)

The evening was prospective's party round #2 (electric boogaloo), which was at Jared's place in West Philly, Crime Central. These were mostly folks in experimental psych with dull-as-ditchwater research interests. I just can't get into basic cognitive psych -- it feels so passe, somehow. Kinjal and I had made a pact to do our first Irish car bomb together (as an early St. Patrick's day thing), and the assertion that it would taste like chocolate milk turned out to be exactly correct. Between The Pogues, Flogging Molly, and Bailey's, I would say that the Irish pretty much have a monopoly on the good things in life.

Break is promising. I'll go to New York for a bit to visit (duke)ailian if she's free, and make root vegetable casserole, and write my thesis. and 300 is coming out on Thursday. And then back into my hole, and seven weeks of escalating complaints until my defense in May. But first, a pause.