Obligatory Holiday Post

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As the end of the year quickly approaches, I decided to make another graph for you, Imaginary Readers, to illustrate how I think about years. It shows stress as a function of time, and it clearly depicts the year as a periodic function with a period of roughly a semester. The school year is just the calendar year phase shifted by negative three months, roughly. This is important, because even though 2011 is about to end, I am in the middle of the school year, so it doesn't feel like a new year; it just feels like a new semester.

It's difficult to think of the past year as anything more than the past semester, which was the best/worst semester so far, but it was more than that, because this past year also included the previous semester and May Term and the summer (yes, I did just define a year). A lot happened, and I know that this past year was pretty good, overall, but the way the school year is structured makes it difficult for me to view December as the end of the year. I am so entrenched in the academic system right now, that the semester seems to be the only possible organizational structure that matters, at least is matters much more to me right now than an arbitrary dating system that doesn't make much sense anyways. (I think they could have come up with a better calendar system than just picking how many days will be in a month seemingly at random. Some months have 30 days, others 31, but they don't perfectly alternate, and February can't decide if it wants to be weirdly short or just really short.)

So, on that note, here I am at the end of another semester. A lot happened in the past four months, both personally and academically, the details of which I will not bore you with in this post, Imaginary Readers, because you probably already know them (I am going to stop whining about that now, promise). And now it's the holidays, which are good, if somewhat of a family overload, after which comes the better part of a month which I have historically spent bored and wanting to go back to school, because at school I have things to do and people to do them with, which, not counting my family, I don't have at home. I don't want this year's break to be like breaks have been in the past where I spend it sitting at home feeling sorry for myself, because that's boring and I'm done feeling sorry for myself. After the New Year, I do have some stuff to occupy myself with: people who are still in town and my research. I just have to get through the rest of this week without imploding from boredom. At least my family got a kitten a couple of months ago whom I can play with. Because kittens really do make everything better.