So I have been sick, and am only queasily back on solid food since last night. And I have discovered that basically not leaving one's apartment for three days has strange effects on one. I've been slowly working through my first big stack of student papers and discovering that though I've always hated grading it's not the commenting that I mind so much, or even the reflection of my own poor teaching that I see staring back at me from each page, but the feeling of desperation and hurry. So I'm trying to plod my way through and not be faced at midnight with several hundred pages still to go.

Anyway, back to the strange effects: I looked up to see my cat on the windowsill, and then at my hands clutching the paper of the moment ("Ignorance in America") and my pink grading pen, and suddenly felt this incredible thankfulness about having opposable thumbs. The cat must be so jealous! To all the early hominids who took the initiative to find slightly handier-than-usual mates, and so on--thank you.

Also, I know it's ridiculous, but I feel personally outraged by the early darkness. How could anyone have decided it would be okay for the sun to set at 4:30. Huh? Huh, sun? I don't mind (much) the cold and bluster, but the dark I really hate. Night is fine when it comes at nighttime, but at this hour it seems, and I really mean this in the most literal way, it seems evil. Malicious, and promising the advent of very bad times. Also, I think the early dark, as well as the sickness-induced time for contemplation, has been bringing back memories of a year ago at this time. I got a flash of the feeling of that time earlier today as I was playing my guitar for the first time in a while, and it surprised me. A year ago I was unhappy, I was really miserable all fall, but it wasn't as depressive as the unhappiness that set in later in the year. This is a weird word but it's the one that came instantly to mind--I felt powerful. It was a kind of edgy, out-of-control manic energy, and when I think back, I was a little nuts in the fall. I was working out kind of obsessively and feeling everything super intensely but feeling things also, paradoxically, with a kind of fierce detachment. In retrospect, I think I must have been on a kind of adrenaline high for those few months. I think it was how I dealt with having to destroy the happy life I had before I moved, little by little, every day. I almost don't know the person I was then anymore, which is a weird thought and a sad one. Now I feel much more like myself again, which is good. I've always hated the winter dark.

This moment of introspection brought to you by procrastination and Proust and by the hope that anyone nice enough to bother reading a long post about nothing will also be inclined to forgive the solipsism (par for the course anyway) and the psychobabble.