Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Grown Up and Tired

Pocket of Bolts and I stayed up really late last night for no particular reason. PoB was worked up about writing a response to some listserv message he got, and I was trying to figure out how to "borrow" Chinese electronic books from this site that my grad school has subscribed to. It's an interesting concept. I crashed the reader a lot of times. We didn't get to bed until half past one.

I had to submit my chapter this morning by eleven, so I was under a lot of pressure. Life must be pretty good, though, because even in the midst of my stress I still felt that there was a lot to be happy about and thankful for. In any case, I submitted the chapter. There were a LOT of footnotes missing, but I'm betting they won't mind too much. If they do, oh well.

After lunch I headed off to U of C. I felt extremely tired, on account of the midnight oil I'd been burning, and let-down from the stress. Still, I learned some interesting things, such as that the character for "love" (a very late character) is closely related to one that originally meant "to have trouble breathing due to excessive eating or drinking." Go figure, huh?

It's very cold now. The snow has melted and refrozen in a cruddy slick on the sidewalk. I have been thinking about growing up, what it means to be an adult, why I don't quite feel that I am one, how it happened that I'm in this strange liminal state. I guess it's because I had a birthday and feel like I ought to be more grown up at 33. Of course, maybe this comic is right about the matter...

Update: anonymous reader suggests this comic too, on the same theme. It's pretty funny, even though 27 is so... 6 years ago. Guess the repo man is behind schedule.

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