Not enough hours in the day

And there really aren't. Being a graduate student, especially at an American university, is bloody hard work. Let me give you an example of my day yesterday.

7:15 a.m. The alarm goes off. I hit snooze. Four times. Am eventually awakened by the noise of the whackjob next door trying his best not to cry, since he's on his last warning about behaving himself. I get up, eat breakfast and decide whether or not to hit the gym (I'm packing a few too many pounds these days - it's all the great pizza around me...).

9:00 a.m. Decide not to. Spend the next three and half hours sitting in Starr library reading through Abe Kobo's Suna no Onna. Get about 90 pages done.

12:00 p.m. Have lunch with one of Hamilton Deli's excellent sandwiches. Eat lunch while reading the wonderfully parochial Columbia Spectator.

1:00 p.m. Go to work in the Law Library. Spend the next three hours cataloguing new books in the library, all of which are Japanese books on legal matters and most of which are dull as ditchwater. Although I did have to decide for one book whether it should go under Homosexuality - Law and Legislation - Japan or Sex Change - Law and Legislation - Japan. So it's not all dull.

4:00 p.m. I have to attend a talk being given by a prospective candidate for a 2-year teaching post at Columbia. I'm one of four graduate students who actually show up, the rest of the ten people there being faculty. It's reasonably interesting, but I'd rather be elsewhere.

6:00 p.m. Now there are certain perks sometimes. I and one of the other grad students are invited out to dinner with the prospective employee and half the faculty. Steak frites and crab cakes at the University's expense. Nice. The guy did his MA at Cornell, which one of our faculty remarks is the suicide hot spot in the Ivy League. I quip that I've felt like throwing myself off a bridge on the way to the library a few times too. Turns out one of the candidate's friends when he was a grad student killed himself there. Whoops. Nice one Tucky.

7:30 p.m. Back to the library and back to Suna no Onna.

9:30 p.m. Hit the gym and try to work out for an hour or so. It's very crowded, more so than I remember it ever being. Perhaps everyone's still trying to work off that Spring Break Excess.

10:30 p.m. Home. Knackered. Check e-mail and manage to get to bed by midnight.