Say I can say words only simple

I feel the nervousness in my stomach and in my head, but I think it's the good kind.  I set up mail forwarding today, and started making appointments.  I booked a hotel room tonight, and printed out my driving itinerary.  Tomorrow, I have to go to campus for the last time ever, and get all the books moved out of the office and return my keys.  I need to eat or throw away the last of my perishable groceries by Tuesday.  Two days from now, I will drive out of Cornstate and begin the process of relocating myself (and eventually, my stuff) to Bosstown.  Eeep.

Stuff is beginning to happen, rather fast.  Not just stuff, you know, but Stuff.  I'm pretty scared, honestly, but I'm also hopeful.  I'm too excited and scared and nervous to say much more than that. But I'm hopeful that all the changes will bring good things.

Wish me luck, friends!

Everyone knows you're going to live

I have posted this song on this blog once before, when I was getting over some very silly heartbreak.  That's what the song is about, of course.  But I suddenly realized a few days ago that the song is now speaking to me in a new register, in regard to my career drama.  It's unsettlingly on point, given that I have had moments over the last month when I actually felt like I was dying.  And yes, I know that is completely batshit insane.  I don't deny that at all.  But it was a real emotion.

A number of people have likened the academic job market to an emotionally abusive relationship with a partner who refuses to affirm you.  If I'm in the process of (at least temporarily) breaking up with academia, then it's comforting all over again to listen to Spektor sing this song.

Back to work (and I'm glad of it)

Good grief, but I am tired.  It's been an utterly miserable few days here for weather, as everyone knows from the constant news reports.  I now consider 20ºF to be balmy and pleasant, after several days of -15º to -5º.  I've been on an online shopping binge for heavy weather clothing: boots, sweaters, socks, wool pants.  I'm considering browsing the sites for nice long underwear.  (This may or may not be a cry for help.  I'll see what the going prices are.)

I'm additionally dragged out from playing host to a friend who just moved to the area and pleaded to come stay with me until the deep freeze and snow had passed — zi was terrified by the prospect of being snowed in when zi had no internet and, really, no local contacts as yet in case of emergencies.  The upshot of this was two high-strung, stir-crazy people eating too much, drinking too much, and eventually getting into bizarre fights.  I am heartily sick of hosting, maybe even more so than I am sick of this fucking winter weather.

But I am free now, and can enjoy the solitude of my apartment as an asset.  Plus, tomorrow is the first day of my stupid little January term course, so I'll be getting out of the house regularly for work purposes.  I'd actually be thrilled to be going to campus tomorrow, if it weren't for the frightening road conditions between here and there.  I drove to the supermarket this afternoon to replenish my locust-despoiled post-visit refrigerator, and it was honestly scary.  My little Beetle has some good qualities, but road-worthiness in snowy, icy weather is not among them.  I got stuck once in snow too deep for my wheels to get traction, and I was fishtailing at little about 40% of the time thereafter, even at 20 mph.  I've never been so exhausted by quick trip to the grocery store.

On the plus side, a colleague with a sturdy all-wheel drive vehicle has kindly agreed to take me to and from campus tomorrow, so I don't have to fear dying on the road before I even start teaching this calendar year.  I'm hoping that Cornstate will get its act together and have the roads properly cleared off for Friday's commute, for my poor car's sake.

Enough of this f-ed-up winter vacation.  Get me back to the office!

RBOC: Mired in the semester

• This semester may never actually end.  CBU actually lists the due date for grades as December 26.  Fucking seriously, CBU?
• I just finished grading the papers for my little topics course.  On to the two intro courses' worth.  Oy.
• Two more weeks of classes before the exam period even starts.  Seriously, FML.
• On the plus side, I'm still wringing the occasional tenure-track job posting to apply to out of this semester's listings.  This seems more exciting than it really is only because I've already begun to steel myself to give up on the tenure track and apply to more contract jobs.
• Three weeks away, and I'm already dreading going to visit the folks in Hometown.  At least I'm only going for a single week.
• This should be the place in the post in which I complain about having to teach a truly pointless January term course, thus rendering my winter break almost non-existent.  But, since that will at least occupy some of my mind and make me wake up at normal hours so I can work, it may well be a blessing in disguise.
• The wretched Christmas shopping season is upon us, complete with that goddamn music in every place of retail business, including my local bar.  I grit my teeth.
• Which reminds me: when people here in Cornstate ask you this or that about "the holidays" coming up, and you explain that you don't actually celebrate that holiday, they think you're setting them up for a punchline.
• Then, when you explain that you're a Jew, they think you're using some kind of profanity in a sick self-deprecation bit gone wrong.  It terrifies me to see South Park come to life in any degree.
  

My heart is never cold

It's been a rough week over here at chez Koshary.  Lots of emotional turmoil: not just my usual unbloggable misery – though that was certainly part of the mix – but also some unusual unbloggable misery stemming from the troubling events of late in Research Country.  It's miserable just to recount the general outline of events, so I'm going to skip that.  Suffice it to say that a lot of people I respect (and perhaps a few that I even fear as well) are acting in disrespectful and disrespectable ways toward each other, and I feel the need to keep my head down, lest I get sucked into some absurd argument on Facebook.

But yeah.  This week kind of sucked balls.  And with nearly all my friends out of town right now, I've felt rather alone as I dealt with all the bad shit.

Fuck it.  I need to cheer myself up somehow, so I'm sipping an Aperol spritz made with champagne – okay, fine, método de champaña – that I opened for myself because fuck it, I need a break.  And of course, some great music.  It starts off a little slow, but wait until the second verse begins.  That's when this recording comes into its own.

RBOC: Buckling down to summer in spite of my advancing age edition

First, the more personal, grumbly stuff:

• I had a birthday recently.  I was not happy about it.  I've never been conflicted about my birthday before, but I was grappling with the anxiety of being [insert milestone age] and not being all the things I once envisioned I would be at this age.  Fortunately, several friends, including the lovely Fie Upon This Quiet Life, took me out for cheese and wine, which made it much better.
• I'm really not so thrilled with the increasingly evident male-pattern baldness that I can see on my head every morning before I shower.  It's not a pattern I've ever seen in any living ancestor of mine.  I find myself scanning old family photographs to divine some idea of what I will look like in another ten years or so.  (The endemic genetic tendency on all sides?  Dorky.  I'm doomed.)

Okay, now for the better (or at least more academic) stuff.

• This is THE SUMMER OF SCARY WORK.  Okay, maybe not quite creature-feature scary, but it's intimidating.  I have until the end of summer to finish my book revisions whilst I plan my syllabi, one prep of which will be brand-new.  And, at time of writing, I really don't give a damn about the syllabi.  Ho hum.
• The book, now that I care about.  I've been digesting ideas for a while now without much committing them to print, but now that I've kicked out the most recent article, I have a lot more stuff to shoehorn into the manuscript.  Naturally, that doesn't fully address the critiques on my plate, but it will go some way toward that goal.
• Oh, and just in case you missed reading my anxious thoughts about employment, I'm back on the job market this fall, as I roll into the second year of my term contract.  At the moment, I have delusions that I will blast into the job market like an avenging anti-hero in a revisionist Western charging into a saloon to annihilate everything that moves.  No doubt, though, that I will soon fall back upon my more familiar metaphorical avatar of Frodo desperately clawing his way up Mount Doom before he expires from exhaustion and despair.  But hey, that's another day and another cup of coffee!
• I'm getting paid this summer!!  The pro-forma renewal letter that CBU sent me explained that my second contract year begins in July, which means I will have no paycheck gap this summer.  I am even more pleased about this than I am astonished.

Back to the online world

It seems that my brain needed to hibernate for a bit after the semester ended.  This wasn't really possible, since I had an article to revise and a trip to Hometown to execute – unbloggable sad stuff blah blah blah – but my brain tried its hardest to shut down anyway.  The upshot was that I had no psychic energy to deal with posting about these things in media res.  Only now that I am back in Cornstate, and have uploaded the doubly revised version of my article manuscript, do I feel like I can do this again.  Funny how the mind works.

So, hi, everyone!  I hope you all haven't abandoned the blog for lack of new posts.  I'd better go catch up on yours, so you know I'm still alive.

Selfish but happy

After several weeks of work, including

• a spring break largely dedicated to my writing, 
• a freaking 12-hour work day today, 
• a case of tendonitis bad enough to warrant buying several little doohickies to wear on my arm so I could keep typing and cooking as needed,
• and a serious case of cabin fever from sitting at my desk so damn much,

I completed the first draft of an article and sent it off to the editor for commentary.  Check out that writing meter over there!

Once that was done, I checked in on the family back in Hometown.  It was an almost unstinting parade of human misery, including a truly awful progressive disease, punctuated only by occasional plaintive acknowledgment of how far away from everyone I am.  I swallowed hard and got through the phone calls.

And then I made dinner.  And had a few glasses of wine.  And you know what?  I may be a horrible, selfish asshole, but the plain truth is that I'm still in a good mood as a result of finishing that article draft.  Does it make sense that I feel a little bad about feeling good?

Whatever.  I'm going to finish my wine and eat some lovely food I just cooked.

Chad gadya

You win some, you lose some.  I'm not doing so poorly this year, but I struck out on one count: this year is the first one ever in which I have no Seder to go to for Passover.  Kind of a bummer, I must admit.

There aren't many Jews in Cornstate, and the ones I've run into so far are, frankly, not my cup of tea.  I learned last year that going to a Seder with people I don't know and don't much care for isn't really fun.  Since I haven't met anyone I trust to do a Seder the way I'd enjoy it, and since just about anyone who might host or attend a Seder lives at least forty-five minutes down the road from me in one direction or another, and since today was a huge snowstorm anyway, I bagged the effort.  Better alone than in bad company, right?

Sigh.  Guess I'll just have to party by myself this year.

Diversis sermonibus pertemptatum finitimus

• I've paid off the last of my lingering credit card debt.  The monkey is off my back!  (For now, anyway.)
• The big IRS portion of my tax refund arrived.  Ahhhhh.  Knock on wood, I can actually start to amass some savings to see me through the summer.
• I just picked up Madhur Jaffrey's Quick and Easy Indian Cooking.  I'm excited about experimenting with new recipes, especially ones that don't require a huge amount of effort after the workday.  (I'm going to politely ignore the amount of fat that some of the recipes include, for the moment.)
• Speaking of cooking fat, I was searching for a recipe for chopped chicken liver, which led me to a recipe for schmaltz.  Shudder.  It's entirely possible that I will try that someday just for the tinkery challenge of it – especially with my increasingly greasy and well-seasoned cast iron pan – but it makes me mildly ill just to look at the pictures of the ingredients in process.  I really don't understand how my Ashkenazi ancestors ever lived past the age of 50 in the pre-modern era.
• I sometimes wonder what it felt like to be one of those first proto-Ashkenazim who emigrated so far north of the Mediterranean that they could no longer acquire olive oil for pareve cooking. 
  "Well, the only fat we can even get out here in the boonies is butter.  How are we supposed to cook meat without oil?"
  "I dunno.  You think we could maybe just render animal fat into cooking grease?"
  "Oh, yeeeeccccccch!  That's gross, man!*  But....I guess I don't have any better ideas.  Go get the meat pan — and, uh, maybe some onions just to make this seem a little less nasty."
• Some geeky anti-MOOC brilliance here.  It makes me wish more people tried to formulate ideas in Yoda's (apparently native?) grammar and syntax.  Seem smarter and more insightful, it makes things.

*Get it?  Get it?  Okay, it's not the best Judeo-German pun ever, but whatever.  It's no worse than half the jokes that Freud published.

Unsettled moment

When I was a kid, I was vaguely aware that my grandfather had married and started a family pretty late in life.  I had little sense of relative ages or time when I was that young, but I understood that the family thought it remarkable.  I also remember thinking that I'd like to do that stuff when I was younger, so my parents wouldn't seem so old to my kids as my grandparents did to me.

It just hit me today that in a year from now, I will be exactly the age that my grandfather was when my father was born.

Dragging

Dude.  The last few weeks have been so tiring for me.  Really, the entire month of November kicked my ass.  First I was preparing for the Big Giant Pseudology Conference.  Then I actually attended the BGPC.  Then I endured a week in Hometown.  (Virtually back to back!)  Then I had to get my ass back into gear for the following school week.

Inevitably, all that travel and stress has given me a cold to further enervate me.  Could be worse, though: it's not one of those colds that wallops you, but only saps some of your energy and desire to talk.  As you all know, it's hard not to talk when you're the professor.  Luckily, I have constant access to orange juice and the most potent panacæa* yet discovered: my grandmother's chicken soup recipe.  In an effort to ratchet up the sinus-clearing and throat-healing powers of this formidable soup, I added two tablespoons of cayenne pepper.  Perhaps the soup could have done just fine with only one tablespoon, but it sure cleared my sinuses. 

I'm down to a single remaining week of class, and then there'll be exam week and grading.  I feel like I may have to be carried to work on a stretcher for sheer exhaustion.  You know how sometimes you feel too weak to lift your limbs to do your class prep, even when you're perfectly healthy?  I'm reaching that point now, and my nose and throat are still misbehaving.

But on the plus side of things, part of my exhaustion comes from

• having enjoyed my best BGPC ever, replete with networking, good meals, and a renewed sense that my colleagues take me seriously as a scholar;
• having done some things that needed to be done in Hometown, unpleasant as they may have been;
• somehow keeping my classes running, although I admit this part has suffered as a result of the first two accomplishments.

I am amused to observe that, as personal as all this stuff is, it's structural at a larger level: every one of my colleagues at CBU agrees with me that our asses are dragging as we approach the end of semester.  We all have different stories, but they all have the same conclusion.  Perhaps I really have joined the club in some way.

*I love typing those fiddly letters and diacritics.  Don't you?

Thanks

I'm currently gritting my teeth and getting through another tough period in Hometown.  I'm feeling rather vitriolic and ungracious toward a number of people and things right now.  But, since it's Thanksgiving, I thought it would be worth reminding myself of a few people and things I'm actually thankful for.

• I actually like my job.  
• I actually like most of my students.
• I really like my colleagues.
• I have a job.  (Attending the Big Giant Pseudology Conference and meeting some old friends reminded me that some of my colleagues have never held a full-time academic job with health benefits.)  
• My book contract.  'Nuff said.
• The few people in my family who actually make my life easier, rather than harder.
• My health.  Visiting Hometown reminds me of that pretty sharply.
• My sanity.  See above.
• My friends.

And so to bed.  Happy Thanksgiving, all.

It's being a week

Two more elderly relatives back in Hometown died in the past week.  These were not sudden tragedies, at least; they were elderly and infirm people.  And, in the case of one, it was something of a mercy anyway.  But the mood of the phone calls to and from Hometown this week is distinctly downbeat.

More unbloggable stuff.  So it goes.  Sometimes there's nothing left to do but hold on.

Good wishes

I'm constantly over-tired and underslept nowadays, and I would like to complain about a number of things.  Right now, though, I can't be bothered: I'm too busy nervously checking the news about Hurricane Sandy.  Almost my entire family is sitting right in the storm's path at one point or another.  I can't even think right now about the property damage some of them will surely sustain; I just want everyone to make it through the storm and its aftermath alive and well.

Fingers crossed.

Adulthood

A few weeks ago, I was having coffee with a friend about my age, and we were discussing all the stuff we do every day that gives that "wow, I guess I'm an adult" sensation.  We're young enough that we still have occasional flashes of feeling like adolescents impersonating grown-ups, and perhaps we even flatter ourselves a bit that we are so youthful as to be mistaken for mere pups still wet behind the ears.  (In my case, these latter sensations are intensified by being the youngest member of my department.)  But, when we're honest with ourselves, we admit that we have been adults for a while now, even if we don't always feel like it.

Why wouldn't I feel like an adult, aside from being younger than my colleagues?  As my friend and I agreed, it was the sense that we didn't necessarily know the right or best thing to do in a given situation, and we just had to do the best we could to make it up as we went along.  I'm still in shock at the realization that this, in fact, is what everyone does.  No one really knows what they're doing.  Everyone is making it up as they go along.

My friend and I also agreed that this realization had a much more unsettling implication for us: all those adults that we looked up to when we were children, who seemed eternally ready for anything and infallibly knowledgeable about everything important, were actually doofuses just like us making it up as they went along.  I mean, jeez, when my parents were my age, I knew them!  Knowing that my parents were neither more knowledgeable nor wiser than I am now, when they seemed to know everything, gives me an almost terrifying feeling of how fragile and fallible the whole world truly is.

This makes me feel simultaneously better and worse about how I'm navigating my way through some heavy unbloggable stuff relating to my family.  I really dislike wading into situations in which I don't know what I should do, especially when there are real consequences for a number of people no matter what I choose to do.  But, at least, I'm no worse off than anyone else.

RBOC: Who by fire?

There's just no way for me to enjoy 99% of all synagogue services I have ever attended, at least since I stopped believing in God in my early teens.  And yet I end up going sometimes, usually out of one social obligation or another than any spiritual curiosity of my own.  So it was this year that I got suckered into going to Rosh Hashanah services at CBU: I feel more sense of tradition about the dinner than about the religion, and I just didn't have the beytsim to stop by for the food and then bug out before the evening service.  After which, of course, the tiny congregation's leaders said to me, "We'll see you tomorrow morning, right?"  Sigh.

• The congregation is so tiny that it includes faculty, staff, and students from CBU.  I feel somehow exposed and thrown off by associating in this way with my students.
• No brisket for Erev Rosh Hashanah dinner?  WTF?
• Fucking tuna fish as the protein of choice?  What the shit?
• There's just no way not to be a little intimidated by the newness of people in a new congregation.  Especially when your Hebrew is really shaky/non-existent.  I completely chickened out of going up to the front to participate, more out of Hebrew-language stage fright than my philosophical disagreements with organized religion.
• One of the more dispiriting things about going to a new congregation isn't so much the unfamiliarity of the faces, but the unfamiliarity of the tunes.  I hate it when I can just about remember the tune to a prayer, only to find that everyone else has some other (usually lame) tune that they all use.
• Speaking of tunes: Seriously, cantor?  You accompany yourself on a guitar?  On a fucking guitar?  Who the fuck do you think you are, Reverend Lovejoy?  I don't like it a damn bit; the aesthetics are all wrong.  Just like there's no crying in baseball, there's no strumming in services.
• Holy crap, he has the guitar because he only knows how to play and sing in major scales.  You know what this shit sounds like in a major key?  Anglicanism.
• Ditto this English-language bullshit.  Yeah, sure, I'm pretty much illiterate in Hebrew, but at least Hebrew sounds like prayer to me.  We sound that much more insane when we intone prayers in English.  If nothing else, harmonic-minor tunes in Hebrew inspire a sense of contemplation and ontological reflection for me.
• It's incredibly anxious to be in a little congregation for these things, since you perforce feel  more a part of things, even if you'd like to just hang back by the wall in anonymity.  When you grapple with your feelings about personal engagement with religion, it's awfully confusing and unsettling to be thrown into communal engagement with ritual practice.
• I dislike the people who are more religious than I.
• I dislike the people who are less religious than I once was.
• I really dislike the smug senior who can't shut up about his semester abroad in Israel.  No, I really don't want to hear anymore about it.  No, I am not impressed with you.  No, I do not give a flying fuck.  No, I really don't give a flying fuck.
• I've identified for years as a Jewish atheist, but now I may have to amend that to Conservative Jewish atheist.  This Reform Judaism business is such a weak cup of coffee that I don't even feel anything against which to rebel properly.  Clearly, I have serious identity issues to work on.
• I find it deeply depressing to read the language of most of these services.  Declaring our group fealty to an especially fickle and schizophrenic Invisible Patriarchal Ideal in the Sky just rubs me the wrong way, even if the leader of the prayer is hippie-dippie enough to re-word some of the language to refer to the deity in the feminine.  Once in a while, though, the language strikes a contemplative chord with me — like the following:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquillity and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.

And then I realize that Leonard Cohen said it better in his rewrite.  And then I start thinking that I should write a service based on Leonard Cohen songs.  Because I would totally freak out with excitement if I could come to services and hear/see something like this:

Frazzled: the run-on

OMG I am so tired that I can barely focus my eyes right now but despite that I am drinking an after-work beer at my desk because I'm underslept from trying to work on my syllabi and tone up the response to my readers' reports and all of that was sort of thrown off to the side last night because I had to change my cell phone number because it used to belong to some cheap thug and I was getting scary text messages and so now I'm underslept and had to go to a workshop on campus this morning and don't get me wrong the workshop is actually through Wednesday and then I have another workshop to go to on campus for Thursday and Friday for which I'm even less prepared and all I really want to do right now is finish my response and then think cool thoughts about my upper-division syllabi but I can't really do that right now because I'm a little stressed out because my entire back from my hips all the way up through my shoulders and neck is sore from helping Fie Upon This Quiet Life do a little preparatory moving and also I'm totally stressed out because my car's electrical system is slowly going on the fritz and my car title is totally fucked because the bureaucrats in Godforsaken State fucked up the odometer reading and now I'll have to get a notarized document and mail off the title certificate so that they can send me a corrected version if they feel like it and so until then I'm driving around Cornstate with expired license tags from Godforsaken State and a broken headlight cover and apparently as of last night a burnt-out turn signal and as if that weren't enough my dishwasher is on the fritz for real and I half-suspect that my leasing company will have to replace the whole damn thing so I guess it's good that I've built up so much experience in hand-washing dishes because that's what I'm still doing until they get around to that and that decreases my energy not only to cook but to worry about the subtleties of pedagogical method that this workshop is exploring and as if that weren't enough to fray my nerves I learned this morning that a family friend has died and that creates a lot of unpleasant unbloggable problems for my family so enough about that but at least I suppose I have my own health and I'm slowly figuring out my syllabi although I have four freaking days at the end of the semester for my Intro to Libel and Slander for which I literally have nothing fucking scheduled because I will have completely run out of things to say and again I must remind myself that life really could be a whole hell of a lot worse and hey I guess I've had much worse problems than my new-found difficulty in juggling schedules to go out with the sudden and I mean really sudden and unanticipated rise in women who want to go out with me and hell I suppose that if I have to take the constant low-level risk of driving with expired license tags in a dodgy car in order to have a dinner date when my work life is in overdrive and the unbloggable anxiety is rising once again then I'll just have to do that and be content that my social life is suddenly quite interesting.

No cause

As I am wont to do when nursing a broken heart, last night I opted to watch something far more tragic than my own pathetic love life.  Boy howdy, did I pull that off: I found the Trevor Nunn production of King Lear, starring Ian McKellen, in my Netflix.  Since I had the evening open – it requires a real time investment – I queued it up, mixed myself a bourbon and ginger, and pressed 'play'.

Whoof. 

I have never, ever in my life cried as hard at a film as I did while watching King Lear.  I'm not really a weepy film watcher.  The problem here is that, while King Lear certainly took my mind off the girl who broke up with me, it brought up other, much more painful issues.  Anyone who has read the play can guess about those.  I already knew the play reasonably well, having studied it closely in college, and I've seen the Peter Brook film with Paul Scofield.*  That version looks pretty cool, but left me cold.  This one, though, punched me right in the guts.  I was doing all right until Act IV Scene 7. 

Lear:

Be your tears wet? yes, 'faith. I pray, weep not:
If you have poison for me, I will drink it.
I know you do not love me; for your sisters
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong:
You have some cause, they have not.

Cordelia:

 No cause, no cause.

And I just about dissolved.  I couldn't even see the screen for a bit.  There's just no comparison between reading Shakespeare and hearing/seeing it performed.  If I ever work up the courage to see King Lear live, I'm going to bring my own pack of tissues, and hope that I'm not the only blubberer in the theater.

*Side note: man, that was an awesome Shakespeare class.  I am eternally grateful that I got to take that course. 

Time to focus

I just got back from another emotionally draining visit to Hometown.  It's a damn good thing that they make drugs for these situations.  (To say nothing of red wine.)

Brief update on my cousin that might disappear, depending on how dishy I feel it is: zi is recovering well from the stroke, although the aphasia is apparently known to be the most stubbornly lingering effect.  Zi literally cannot say very many words right now, but has full (and sophisticated) comprehension of what zi hears.  Zi is also relearning how to read and write.  It's a little daunting to see what the stroke did to hir, but it's also a huge relief to see that the mind and psyche remain fundamentally the same.

Now that I'm back, I have a few more days to get ready for my campus visit.  Perhaps I should draft that job talk.  Ahem.  Hey, don't look at me like that — if you had to spend the last few days the way I did, you'd be behind on work, too.  I'll get to work on that tomorrow morning.  Right now, all I can do is fold laundry, drink wine, and attempt to beat my own high scores in Angry Birds.