The great thing about living on the semester system is that despite a great deal of work during the long semester, long breaks are the reward. After a four day grading binge, I entered my last grades last night. And until January 20, my life is my life. I spent the day reading, finishing a book , starting another,  buying a few more, going for a walk, cleaning my room and organizing papers, and relaxing with some glasses of wine. 

Tomorrow I begin a trip to Minnesota, my home. After taking a bus from Chicago to Minneapolis and meeting my parents, I’m taking my old jeep up to Duluth to stay with a friend for a night. Then it is off to Bemidji, my Jerusalem (to put it strongly). There, I will stay with a professor and her family (she is a good friend as well) and see many of my old mentors during the annual faculty Christmas party. I hope to see many other friends as well, either at coffee or at one of the few remaining bars.

It will be wonderful to leave the city and head up to the northwoods where the air is clean and the sky is big and clear. Frozen water, pine forests covered in snow, the Mississippi, Lake Superior, and Paul Bunyan.  It will be cold, but it will be beautiful. 

For the few people who read this, I am slowly taking back up the practice of writing and I hope that this blog becomes more active and frequented in the future.  I was about to say that my posts will drop off during the break, but there are so few posts as it stands that that is probably not true 🙂 I am looking forward to my trip, and to the future in general. Many exciting things are afoot.  More later.

Ah, grading papers. My midnight companion. I am not hating it tonight as much as usual. I am actually enjoying it. However, I’m not writing any comments tonight. I’ll save those for the students who ask for them this time; this is the end of the semester and so few students will seek them anyway. And with over 120 6 page papers, I think 720 pages of reading is enough work.

The fire changes. A fire is never the same from one instant to the next. It is hard to tell if the fire has a form even in an instant. Is it entirely ephemeral? Or does one lick of a flame definitely exist, if just for a second?

All of life is a fire. Nothing stays the same, although some licks move so slowly, it looks as though they are permanent structures. Mount Everest, though, is an object in motion. It rises up, and it will sink down.   Nothing is certain, except in the instant.

I am feeling the need to write, although I do not have much to write about today. Nothing terribly exciting at least. So this will likely be an unexciting post.

The semester’s end draws near. This has been a hectic semester. I always felt like I was running behind in work, despite working as much as I could before my brain gives up on me. 

However, it has been a good semester for other reasons. I have been making some new friends, and watching older friendships change. One new friend in particular has amazing promise. She is the sort where hours and hours dissolve in a moment because of a great chemistry in personalities and conversation. I think this is the sort of friendship that Aristotle might describe as the “excellent type,” where the person is not valued simply for pleasure, but because the friendship assists in the improvement of my character.