I took this weekend to do some reading for pleasure, rather than seeing just how close I could get a match to the pages of Bakhtin's "
The Dialogic Imagination" without setting the pages on fire. I always forget how much my favorite pastime relaxes me (the reading, not the fire). It's like a 'reset' button on my brain, but not one of the ones you have to push by shoving a paperclip into it. That's more what school feels like. I read some comics, immersed myself in a young adult fantasy series by one of my favored authors, and scored some great deals for future reading at the used book store. As usual, this has lead to me spending way too much time managing
my Shelfari page, but even that has a certain relaxation factor to it. I should require myself to read at least one book for fun each month. When the school year hits, I tend to stop reading anything fun that isn't
fanfiction. Allowing myself one novel per month would likely go a long way toward alleviating some stress. The only problem is stopping once I start! I've blown through three short novels in the past few days, and my
Kermode reading for English is starting to get jealous. Maybe I'll see how flammable it is after class today.
So, not that I'm counting or anything...but the last day of classes is only 21 days away. The last day of exams is May 8th, but I keep forgetting that this university is huge, and thus has an exam period of almost two weeks, most of which has nothing to do with me. My undergrad university took about five days, and two of those days the campus was nearly empty. So, freedom and sanity are far closer than I originally thought, and I'm feeling a bit more hopeful about my chances of finishing this semester alive. If someone takes the matches away, I might even make it to the end without burning any particularly nasty theory texts.
I think I'm going to buy one of those giant desk calendars so I can draw large, satisfying X marks over each day that passes. Maybe using a razor blade. We'll see what kind of week I have.
