Fifteen Days

This might, I think, be the longest hiatus I've managed since I created this blog (did you miss me? I know you did. I'm feeling the love right now). The reasons are pretty easy to surmise; I'm hellishly busy right now with various papers and admin stuff that needs to be done, and that, aside from taking up a lot of my time, doesn't make for particularly interesting reading. I'm really excited about this big research paper I'm about to write on the use of the figure of Sugawara no Michizane in the Meiji period, but I think even those of you who've been to Japan would probably find it fairly uninteresting. In stark contrast to the rest of my blog, obviously. What? Oh.

It's not all bad, though, one does manage to blow off some steam from time to time. Ben Jennings, former fellow CIR from the UK, was visiting a couple of Fridays ago. He now has the job that pretty much every 12-year-old would kill for, in that he works for the company that runs Pokemon in the UK, and was here on business. We went for a few drinks, chatted to a few people, charmed a barmaid on the Lower East Side into giving us free drinks because of our cute accents, and wound up in a headhunter bar. I mean, literally a headhunter bar. Like, masks and shrunken heads on the walls. Different type to what I think most of you corporate types are used to.

But it gets hard to run a social life when academic work can be so all-consuming. After that it was 15-hour days pretty much every time, and will be most of the way to Thanksgiving, I think. It meant that I couldn't find time to see Sarah, who was in the US on vacation. Not the first time that'd happened...Nat passed through about a month ago, and I missed her, as well. Today a group of my friends from the Lit program went out to Queen's for Thai food, but I had to turn the invitation down because I calculated that getting there and back, plus dinner, would have taken 4 hours, and I simply couldn't afford to lose that much time out of my day.

Is this how it's always going to be? God, I hope not.

Though thinking about it, they do say that there are four good reasons to be an academic - May, June, July and August. Better hope that's true.