Rain or Shine

Monday mornings are always hard, especially when you’ve had a laid-back weekend and your first appointment is at 5:45 am. They become even harder when you wake up with an upset stomach and throw up first thing in the morning. I still went to ROTC (we were having a platoon competition), but I went back to bed afterwards and skipped my first two classes. I didn’t feel sick, and I wasn’t quite sure what was going on until I talked to my dad, who had the answer. Apparently, this is how stress affects me – not mentally or emotionally, but digestively; the same thing happened to him in college.

In any case, I wasn’t sick, so I went to my evening class anyway. If you were scheduled to tour Harvard Yard at 7 or 8 pm, you might think you would avoid the flurry of people hurrying from one class to another, but you would be wrong. When you live in your workplace, especially with internet, business hours don’t apply anymore. Sometimes you just have to say no to significant things in order to get to bed at a decent hour; fortunately, I don’t have to do that too often.

I spent most of the rest of yesterday writing my history essay. I tend to start with general patterns and theses (what I consider the more interesting part) in my essays and add the details in later. In Philosophy, this tends to work quite well, but in History, it means most of the paper gets written in what is supposedly the secondary stage. We’ll see how it works when I get to my thesis. I finished drafting the essay by mid-afternoon, and after that, my stomach returned to normal.

I did have a restful weekend. After finishing the first part of my history paper Saturday morning, I shifted into Sabbath mode and went on a long run outdoors. It was a little cold, but I warmed up after the first mile or so. My ears, though, just got chillier and chillier, and I’d worked up quite a headache by the time I got back; I have to remember to cover them the next time I run outside. I spent the rest of the day inside, reading and watching various apologetics videos. Most of them (they were lectures, one or two hours each) were from a speaker who came to FUEL last week from Cambridge University. I was able to speak with him afterwards, and the conversation was interesting if brief.

I also led worship at FUEL last week. It was a good week; Helen played piano for one of the songs, and we sang A Mighty Fortress is our God, which is one of my favorite hymns even if most college students haven’t heard it. It’s been an unexpected difficulty to figure out, between whoever of us are singing, just which songs are generally known and which aren’t. We don’t mind introducing new songs, but we’re not sure which ones are new.

In addition, I led LIFE group last week. We’re a very small group – usually four or five, counting leaders – so it’s very cozy. The study was introduced with a passage from Prince Caspian, which was like a breath of fresh air after all the academic reading I’ve been doing in recent days. I think it’s gotten to about that point in the year when I need to go and buy myself a paperback novel semi-spontaneously to revive my imaginative faculties.

The ROTC year is coming to a close, although that means we have a lot of planning to do for next semester. We’ve already started turnover with the new leadership and constructed reams of spreadsheets for the new year. A few more ROTC events are coming up – the SECNAV is speaking at Harvard tomorrow, for one – but I’ll let you know about them as they happen.

There’s one month left until finals are over and my parents get here. I’m only counting weeks, not days, so I still have a little equanimity left. You can tell it’s April; half the time you get miserably cold rain showers, like the one currently deluging outside my window, and half the time you get breathtakingly gorgeous weather, like we had yesterday. It’s pretty chilly either way, but you might get by with a sweater and no coat if it’s sunny out. You can also tell it’s Spring by the crowds of tourists piling into Harvard Yard, umbrellas and all.

I still haven’t decided whether the occasional gorgeous afternoon or budding tree is worth the cold rain and snow, but I think my time at Harvard will be more than worth it. Here’s to all of us starting another week of work!

Pictures:

It was cold and raining.

 And then it was gorgeous.

 From my run by the pond (my phone also took several gratuitous pictures of the ground):

 Another day of class at Harvard:

 And now it's cold and rainy again:

 Working away (the computer lab at the Science Center):