Snow day

I should be in class right now, but I'm home eating oatmeal and bananas with gf, watching the snow taper off. Yesterday when it was time to leave to drive back to school I found myself feeling chilled, hungry, upset, achy, and sleepy. Psychosomatic? Maybe--although I did have a fever of 100.6. So we ordered thai, lay on the couch with blankets, and watched Battlestar Galactica, The L Word, and Rome. Eventually I warmed up and felt better, but not before my window to drive back disappeared. Then it started snowing.

This morning it is still spitting snow. I need to drive back, and I will, and the strange part is, I don't even feel guilty. I needed a lazy weekend. I needed this snow day, this putting off the week for a few more hours.

Last week was perhaps the craziest week of my life (and remember, I was on the academic job market for four years). It began with a Monday morning interrogation in Constitutional Law. Some of my classes have scheduled participation instead of random hazing. This means that class may be organized into panels, so each day some students must be extra-prepared, knowing they will be called upon at length. Monday morning at nine o'clock was my time. I got up early to be extra-prepared. Tuesday we had a rough draft of a change of venue memo due. I got home from class at three, sat down, and worked on the memo till one. I sat up till two reading for Con Law, then went to bed and was up at eight.

I have another class--Civil Procedure-- where the teacher is running down names alphabetically. Guess whose name was due to come up on Thursday or Friday? Also, the final draft of the venue memo was due Friday morning. And there was an extra Civ Pro squeezed in there--a makeup on Friday at noon. By Thursday afternoon it was clear that THAT particular makeup class would be the one where I was called on.

Up till two Thursday night finishing the memo, then up at 8:45 the next day. Skip Statutory Interpretation, unfortunately, because there would be no time to prepare to be called on in Civ Pro at noon otherwise, since the writing class where the memo was due was at 11 am.

Get up and read, read, read for Civ Pro, and try desperately to nderstand the rules for diversity jurisdiction in the cases we were studying. Ah! Not finished, and it's 10:50! Throw on clothes and screech out of driveway. Parking meter at 10:59. Dash to class to turn in paper. Read more in the ten minutes between that class and the next. Go to class and be grilled for 20 minutes straight. Slump over in seat when he moves on.

Home for lunch before next class. Pack and throw stuff in the car for trip home this weekend. Too tired to make sense of the reading. Dash to class, nod off, jump in car and drive home.

Hit traffic. Add extra hour on trip.

Get home three and a half hours later and swing by apt. to pick up gf for dinner plans with other friends. Go pee. Go to restaurant.

Sit and talk with friends. Drink martini. Drink wine. Come home and collapse.

Slow Saturday. Slower Sunday. Lazy Monday.

Time to get up and get going. Gf off to teach. Together we will brush off our cars, parked in the street. We will hold each other tight and whisper about Friday. She will drive to school and I will drive away and we will listen to music and think about each other and think about the week, starting slowly, rolling faster now, passing by in the minutes and hours wished away, our precious time in this life spent waiting between the weeks, between the snowstorms, watching the clock tick by until we can be together again for another timeless, lazy weekend.