Spring

What I'm supposed to be doing right now ('now' meaning this sunny, windy morning) is write 10 pages of my thesis, 3 pending assignments, walk my standard 20 blocks in half hour (not in that order), but here I am in my basement hole of a lab listening to Alice Cooper screaming 'Poison', drinking coffee and... writing... this... sentence. A starting system problem no cranking or jump start can solve. Maybe I should change the song.

Ok.

(Not changing the song, just on repeat).

Spring. The season, not the verb. New birth, new beginnings. Vernal equinox. Blah. The ides of March, March madness. Nowruz, Passover, Easter. April is the cruelest month. Blah. New sentence, old thoughts.

Every March - April, something happens. Not all good. If you're in school, it is midterms / end of the school year (meaning tests and exams again, depending on which part of the world you are in), or preparing for the dreaded passage to, or worse, rejection by engineering / medical schools / jobs. If you're 'lucky' enough to be working, end of 2nd quarter, possible promotions, salary hikes... or lay offs. If you belong to neither categories, something still happens. Mostly by proxy.

So this spring, since I belong to the afore-afore-mentioned category, I am supposed to be writing this paper to graduate. Instead I took a break and looks like it is spilling over. The western world calls this 'spring break', or a more apt description - 'study week' or 'reading week'.

Here's some of the stuff I read this break:

(This one's all hazy like the memory...)

... And why is this so clear? And polite?

 

Apparently, going to an Ivy League school means people assume you can read and make connections and correlations and conclusions.  So here's how it works. You see numbers and words - this translates into songs... think Rolling Stones, Manhattan Transfer and all your idols... and...

... you reach the only possible conclusion - next time take your guitar and hitch hike all the way to Chicago.

Oh, and I studied real hard too, take a look:

So much for spring break...

From San Francisco to Vegas to the Grand Canyon and back to a basement at the Big Apple...procrastinating.

Back to my paper.