Spinning Yarns

The end of the term has come, and with it, the eerie quietude that always fills the campus once the students have gone home for the winter break. Of course, this by no means implies that I can sit idle; I have a paper to write, and a fair bit of work to do preparing for the classes I will be teaching in the winter and spring terms. Even so, it is nice that I can, for a moment, take the spiritual equivalent of a deep breath and settle back for a moment of peace, before moving on.

As if echoing this sense of calm, the sky visited us with an eight-inch blanket of soft snow last night. Perhaps it’s odd, but I find the drive home along a deserted, snow-slick road in the small hours of the morning to be comforting. Not only is it fun to play with the additional degrees of freedom obtained when the wheels can move perpendicular to their direction of rotation; but driving in a snowstorm also affords almost the same kind of splendid isolation that you can get by standing out in an open field during a sweet, sweet summer rain.

Alas, the rest of the world is not so peaceful. Every morning, my radio tells me of chaos and violence in other parts of the world; from suicide bombers in Israel, to riots in Venzuela, to the tragedy of AIDS in Africa and China, to threats of war in Iraq. Everything, everywhere, is always in motion. Those of us who find ourselves with the luxury to think and work and read and reflect, may justifiably derive a powerful sense of our own good fortune, that we have been temporarily spared the whirlwind.

And so, I’m happy that this past term went very smoothly, and that I was fortunate enough to have a really great bunch of students in my class. The fall was also very exciting in terms of research results, and after we get done with our current paper, I have what I hope will turn out to be some productive new ideas to chase down. I’m also hopeful that some of this work will turn into a good dissertation topic for me, as I’m very much interested in getting my proposal out of the way sometime in the near future.

Filed by Michael at 13:13 under Personal, Political
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