HTSS: Day Four, Heat

8:14am "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb."

Why is it that I am always trying (okay, twice) to stop smoking in the dead of summer, when it's oppressively hot and everybody is snapping at everybody else anyway? Am I hoping that my crabbiness will simply pass as heat rage? But then doesn't being hot and crabby just make things worse? Why not try stopping in the winter, when it's cold and I'm calm? Ah, but then I'd be teaching or writing or getting ready for Christmas. Not the best time to be stressed out in nicotine withdrawal there. So I suppose summer it is, when, theoretically, I am on vacation, whatever that means as an academic.*

I guess I'll go do my yoga and sweat some more.

*Read, guilt: you need time off from the stress of teaching, but if you take it, then you've wasted your only clear research time. Which is never really enough to begin with, since there is always a start up period where you're just floundering around, rearranging your photocopies or, now, pdfs.

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