I’m currently writing from a place of sadness and disappointment. Yes, I’m still in the United States. Thankfully, I didn’t miss my flight. However, my trip was delayed due to the weather. While my flight out of San Francisco was still scheduled as of yesterday, my connecting flight in London was canceled, which meant that I’d have to hang out at Heathrow at least overnight, if not for three days, before being able to catch a flight to Göteborg. So yesterday morning, after spending three grueling hours on the phone, crying like a teenage girl to the guy on the other line, and realizing there was no way I was going to make it to Sweden when I’d planned, I reluctantly rescheduled my entire trip.
So instead of leaving on the 21st, I’m flying out on Christmas Day, because the earliest the airline can get me to Sweden is on the 26th. And while there are pros (spending Christmas Eve with my parents, not getting stuck in an airport) and cons (missing Christmas in Sweden, arriving 36 hours before I have to fly to Germany), the biggest preoccupation for me right now is how to spend the next 72 hours.
This predicament is due – in large part – to the grueling semester I just completed. It was also a semester full of more writing than I think I’ve ever done. I did the freelance journalism thing, of course, with band interviews and concerts and articles nearly every week. But I also began working in the university writing center as a tutor. In addition to working four hours a week, I had to keep a journal for work and write a reflection paper at the end. I wrote the first five chapters of my thesis. I wrote a seminar paper examining the discourse of love as it pertains to my own writing. I wrote another seminar paper which was a stylistic analysis of two of E.E. Cummings’ poems. And of course there was German lecture and laboratory, which is all I need to say on that subject.
Due to the demands of last semester, there are a lot of things I love doing that simply got put on the back burner. One of them was making mixes. It has been awhile, but now that I’ve literally got nothing to do, I’ve already made some headway on that in the past 24 hours. I’ve also been quite successful at sitting in front of the fireplace and wearing my pajamas all day long while reading my continually-updated Facebook friend feed, three activities which go along quite well with mix making. (And speaking of Facebook, this Time Magazine Person of the Year article is a fascinating read that I’d highly recommend if you, like me, have nothing better to do – which is likely the case if you’re reading this right now.)
Other ways in which I’ve been able to preoccupy myself: nighttime cold and flu medicine (my sickness is losing the battle as I’m getting 10 hours of sleep each night), spraying additional layers of waterproof protection on my snow boots, hanging out with the cats and occasionally chasing them around, cleaning the bathroom and browsing the job openings on zeit.de in search of the perfect profession.
Ohh, and there’s this too:
