Back by popular demand: blogging. Back by grudging concession to the inevitable: the semester.

Welcome back. There are no new year's resolutions, but perhaps this is a resolution that could be put on some kind of ballot.

Proposal: Professors assigning a full week of reading to be done for the first class... is cheating. The academic calendar reports the semester starts January 22. All days prior to January 22 ought to be part of my vacation. If you can't shoehorn all the readings you want into the normal number of weeks in the semester, that's not my problem.

Corollary: Creating bonus seminar meetings during the regular semester is also a violation of my graduate student rights (hahaha), particularly when you hold them during finals week and require every single class member to give a presentation on extra reading, unrelated to their term papers, and allow the bonus session to go FOUR HOURS. (This, you may have heard, was one of many--but a particularly cruel--source of my end-of-semester ire this fall. I have four words for you: Don't. Take. Art. History.)

Exception: Classes held on Mondays. The semester starts on a Tuesday, so my Shakespare seminar doesn't meet until week 2, which means I won't even do the "advance" reading until classes have already started. This is acceptable, especially because the whacked out academic calendar screws this professor out of a week all the others get. In fact, "advance" ("bonus") reading should be reserved only for Monday professors, to allow them to catch up. The rest of you are just reinforcing an inequality!!

So, as you might infer, my vacation is drawing to its end. I know this because tomorrow I'm going to start reading Sister Carrie. The resumption of my work means I will be taking up blogging again, my age-old procrastination device. Since it's still technically my vacation and I lack the will to really summarize the end of my semester and my vacation thus far, I give you a haiku roundup:

Just 'cause I didn't
fail doesn't mean I didn't
embarrass myself.

One-day term paper:
surprisingly effective
self-punching technique.

You actually can
go home again. You just have
to bring Valium.

Nobody throws a
party like my college friends'
all-nighter, black-out--

Hate everyone else
already; yuppie parties
make me hate myself.

Connecticut, you
are small and pretty but you
have I-95.

Beer and snow. Never
thought I'd say it: Wisconsin,
home sweet fucking home.

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And if you made it this far, here is a slightly different, perhaps more profound summary of last semester: some randomly generated haiku assembled from rearranged blog entries in the recent past. You can have your own made here.

i now see that if
i worked for the next two
hours without stopping

it's comfy it
has a sofa and a list
of prepositions

been in madison
like she never left like a
big lake almost 10

going to come the
fuck on i know it's the
easy part i hate

on the bus okay
look the bus will fill up and
you won't hear me

induced optimism
today is the second type
this takes the form

waiting look at that
list and think this is a case
of wikipedia

it was kinda cool
i liked doing it and
before you know it

hear is full of snow
and ice and if you don't
answer my questions

no it's not like
to touch strangers to pay the
price of touching them

where the hell did i
read this now i have to write
resigned to the fact

my mouth and it's a
store of life experience
of good waste to have

they start to sound like
sense and then there's grunting
and a couple of

and my favorite:

below the surface
of coherence he made two
fists and flailed them

and one i made from becca's blog that was too good not to share:

really wanted
this paper to be done but
i chickened out

Here's to a new semester of feeling just shy of miserable.