I am a serious student; please do not bend, fold, stamp, or staple me.

The end of January - and the uni's grant application deadline - is rolling towards me in a threatening manner much reminiscent of storm waves on the beach before I learned to swim. The PhD has been on for about three months, but the general consensus is that it feels more like three years. Which is a bit tough, as the academic year is really only just getting rolling.

That's the one thing I don't like about academics: for everyone else, December 31st is the end of the year, a time to evaluate, drink too much, and generally relax. For those of us attached to the universities the year is only just begun, and any stab at celebrating the holidays the way the rest of the family wants you to celebrate means ignoring deadlines, ignoring responsibilities, and not feeling guilty when you mark your advisor's e-mails as 'read later.' 

Over the break I read two Phillip Roth novels: American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater. Both made me want to stab myself in the face while simultaneously raising my standards for prose so high that I will never be able to read crime fiction again. I thought I could not hate anyone more than I hated Roth. Then I tried reading Saul Bellows. 

Roth isn't so bad, all things considered. 

I also got to hold a baby of more than usual cuteness, which made my biological clock go 'clink, clunk, go adopt a kitten' in a worrying way. And I read a bunch of fiction that was extremely relevant to my project but involved so much death that somewhere in the third week of break I found myself sobbing intermittently while ranting to bare acquaintances about how some hacks shamelessly play with readers' emotions. And I started the novel. And I narrowed down what my critical project will be about. And I made Dave eat massive amounts of pseudo-Mexican food, because going home made me miss rice and beans and there is no way to make one-person batches of pseudo-Mexican food unless you're making box enchiladas, and box enchiladas are just sad. 

So maybe I did get something done over break.

Is it obvious that I'm just avoiding writing the grant proposal?

Maybe I'm avoiding writing the grant proposal.