I seem to be proceeding in ten-day increments. Better than eternity without blogging.

Last two home games for the men's hockey team this weekend, meaning a big sigh of relief and stretching of cramped camera shoulders for the hockey crew down at the TV station. My WCKN life will seem slow with only the news to anchor and perhaps working tech at an odd episode of Chicken Video or Channel 67 movies. The women's hockey team has their final tournament in Rochester this weekend, though due to the three tests I have this week I will be missing three out of four practices; given that, I begin to wonder if I should go or not. It would certainly open up the weekend to get some work done, an event that happens all too rarely. This school sometimes succeeds in making me feel stupider than I have ever felt before, when the overwrought brain simply balks at any sort of coherent thought. The decision to add an environmental science minor to my bulging schedule will be at least something of an exciting bulge, but it will not be enough, I fear, to maintain my academic spirits. My sister Hannah has been accepted, no surprise really, to Durham University and will be returning to England to pursue graduate studies in medieval history. It sounds so professional, so cultured. She really should have been born a Brit. I find myself missing literature, what is in my mind true literature. I looked up and saw the rows of bindings through the window of a book room on the second floor of Snell, and felt a tug for the good old days of a cozy study and being a library bum. I long for the time to sit down and enjoy a good classic. My old friends, Moliere and Dante and Shakespeare, Eliot, Durrell, Eco, Marquez, Austen, Rushdie, Rousseau, Chesterton, even Faulkner, God bless him, and a hundred other names doused in antiquity, peering from the shelves in all their dust-hallowed glory. There is an atmosphere to a well-stocked study, a warmth and air of refinement, of learning, of wisdom and of culture. I feel the same tug with mythology, languages, and cultures. Am I in the wrong major? I don't think I could stand doing that kind of thing as work, though; solely as a hobby, a source of entertainment and personal satisfaction and edification. The stuff I'm good at, to be blunt, to soothe my bruised ego. But where has the time gone? What I need is for the world to stop turning for a while - nothing to happen, nothing necessary, just some time to be alone and to stop this forced thinking that results solely in stagnation. I need to walk along the ocean's edge and watch my footprints sink slowly back into the sand, to lose myself in the sound of the surf and the mourning seagulls. I need to sit beside a chuckling stream and watch the sparkle of sun on brown water, the green of mossy rocks, the hovering trout and the bell tones of the hermit thrush. I need to stand on the mountain top and feel the sun-warmed rock and the breeze in my hair as the sun sinks in a ball of flame and the treetops sublime with golden light in the valley. I need to spend a day watching the tide rise and fall and rise again, to watch the chipmunk amongst the leaves, the osprey wheeling overhead, the perfection of the young oak leaf, a miniature in velvety green spikes, and the winter tree, each tiny twig encased in glittering ice. I need to feel the spin of the earth in my bones again, to hear it breathe in me and through me and around me, and know that I know nothing.

I need to stop waxing poetical and get back to work.