First Snow and Fighting Through

            Welcome to November, everyone! It’s finally gotten cold – we had our first snowfall this past Sunday, one I walked through on my way to church. It wasn’t much, but it was definitely snow, and I finally broke out the winter coat and boots. They served me well. It’s been pretty cold this week in general – it got down to freezing a couple of times. We’ve all taken to wearing our heavy-duty coats outside even when it’s not precipitating.

            Church itself was nice as well – the sermon was on Luke 2, which meant it was both a fresh look at a passage one normally only hears at Christmas time, and it brought back some pleasant memories, as does the Christmas music that has begun to float around campus. And for me, cold weather means Christmas must be close, so it’s almost time to start getting excited.

            Speaking of excitement, the main thing that happened this past weekend was my UC a cappella concert. Hopefully the recordings we made will be put together more quickly than they were last year, and I’ll be able to post the link. The concert went well, everyone did great on their solos and in the block, and we had a lot of fun. We also came together as a group, especially at the last few rehearsals.

            The last rehearsal before a concert is always a little special. We rehearse for as long as it takes, which usually means around 4-5 hours, and in the middle we stop when some of our alumni (read “old friends”) show up with pizza to help us celebrate. At the end of our time, we do “reconciliation”, when people can get together and work out any problems that might have built up over the years, so that we can go into the concert unified. I didn’t get to bed until around one-thirty Friday morning, and I had to sleep over with a friend from UC, since I had ROTC, but it was the happiest I’d been in a while.

            So that was the weekend; it was pretty busy, but it came between two particularly calm weeks, relatively speaking, so everything worked out. I have things scheduled for practically every weekend between now and Thanksgiving, but thankfully (no pun intended) there aren’t that many weeks left. I wake myself up nearly every morning by counting down the days. This has been a particularly difficult semester for me – not overwhelming, most of the time, but definitely draining. I’m burning out.

            Not in a dramatic sense, though. It’s like the battery in my laptop, that still lets me work without a problem, but drains power more and more quickly every time I use it and nearly constantly needs to be charged. Eventually it’s going to be used up. Eventually I’m going to be used up. But I’m fairly certain we both have enough juice left to get us through the rest of this semester.

            Yesterday things came to a head around 5:00. I was sitting in Widener stacks trying to do Arabic. The lights in the stacks are on motion sensors, so if you sit for long enough they all turn off, and that combined with time change left me sitting in relative darkness by 4:30. I couldn’t work. I’m not sure how many things caused the feeling in me, but after a while I found that, even having done very little, I just couldn’t bring myself to keep working. It’s hard to describe the feeling – I just had to get out of there.

            The dining halls open around five, so I headed down to get dinner en lou of finishing my work. On the way, though, I allowed myself to be sidetracked into a bookstore. It was a very good decision. I went from the cold white walls and metal shelves of the stacks to wooden bookshelves in a warm basement with jazz playing softly in the background, and I could feel myself physically and mentally thawing, regrouping, unbending.

            I browsed for a while and bought a five-dollar action novel, the first fiction I’ve read in quite a while just for the sake of reading, and then went to the dining hall, had dinner and a hot cup of tea, and just read for a while. It was much better than trying to cheer myself up with comfort food, and afterwards I found a comfy, wood-paneled, living-room resembling study room to finish my Arabic in. The assignment was much easier than it had looked.

            So that’s my life right now – I’m tired, and I’m losing motivation, but last night I snuggled under the covers with a novel, the way I haven’t in a long time, and I’ll make it through the rest of the semester. I’m worn out but still functional. And in three weeks, I’m going home!