Brrrr

I now know which fashion designer and Eddie Izzard line I am.

Soooo cooooold. My mother keeps making rumblings of hope about my class being canceled tonight. For sleet. Dude, I know this is Alabama, but even we don't cancel shit for sleet.

Trying to get back into the swing of things. I have these awful highs and lows--I mean, not "Girl, Interrupted" awful or anything, but when I'm on a high, I blog and I update and I post and I do all sorts of things, and people come to expect me to, y'know, keep doing that. And then I get sick, or I get tired, or busy, or it gets cold and I go into my annual hibernation-depression mode, and people are like, "Where the hell did you go?" And I lose all my readers and have to go hunt them down again, and really, they deserve better than that. All twelve of them.

I have finally come to realize, though, that it is the cold weather right now, because I do this every January: I'm perfectly happy, spirits high, but physically I feel exactly the same as if I were depressed. Draggy and logy and slothful and unmotivated. And I finally realized: Gee, if this happens from late December to early February every year--the precise months it actually gets cold in Alabama--and you're not unhappy, do you think it could be the weather?

I know this happens to tons of people. Something about there being less daylight and hibernation mode and... stuff. I just don't know what to do about it, other than put on another sweater.

w00t

The dailydigest feed went much more smoothly tonight, despite one rebellious Microsoft smart tag that I can't be arsed to fix right at this moment. Because it is cold, and I am tired.

As you may have noticed, this means that the Digest has been updated again. I know, I can't believe it either.

My lit seminar has turned out to be on "The Literature of Antebellum Reform." Of course, you say "antebellum" here and we immediately think "plantations and hoopskirts," so it was a bit of a relief to see that the prof meant it in only the most literal sense--literature written before 1861. I think all the authors are Yankees, in fact--Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne. I'm really excited about the first book we're reading, a sensationalist serial (cough*blackribbon*cough) called The Quaker City, or, The Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (1845). The prof says it's basically nineteenth-century porn--I wouldn't put it quite that strongly, but I admit that I just opened the book randomly to page 324 and found a young lovely named Mabel fighting off a lustful parson ("Your mother can't save you now! You must come to your pa-pa, my love!").

Talked to a workshop friend who's in Crazy Drunk Professor's class (she's also in the seminar). She says that CDP showed up an hour late and then made everyone go to her house. I am so glad I dropped that class. Dr. Seminar, meanwhile, may be all of five years older than me. He's assigned us a shitload of reading but is all, "You know, just try to get it all done, I know it's a lot." I find a lot of profs who haven't yet taught a class to death don't quite know what can and can't be accomplished in a single semester, which seems to explain the workload. Nonetheless, I have to read the second half of the Foucault book, a Hawthorne short story, and two critical articles (if memory serves) by the next class. It's not as bad as the time we did Tom Jones in three classes, but it's not a cakewalk, either. I am so glad I dropped that workshop class.