I lay in a hot tub for a half hour tonight and felt as though it were the first time I had had a chance to breathe and relax in days. I had to think for a couple of minutes to recall what day it actually was. I have been buried in the basement and chained to my computer since at least Saturday working at one thing or another, and I have neglected my significant other (for which I am deeply sorry), my sleep patterns, my spirituality, my posture, and my diet. Somehow it doesn’t feel that last term was quite this much of a grind; I don’t know why this is so. It’s all been a blur of BBC News, iced tea, journal articles, bibliography citations, one book after another, and the occasional break to attend to the whining of the beagle. The best part is that it will be over in three weeks.

Morrissey may not be making great music anymore, but he’s still good with a one-liner (this one’s from tomorrow’s Guardian):

Q: What do you feel when you look in the mirror?

A: Extreme reluctance.

Census stories fascinate me. This one, from today’s Associated Press wire, shows that San Francisco County lost more residents in 2002-2003 than any other California county (Steve and I left the month after the July 2003 cutoff point).

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County gained the most residents (which is ironic, considering that people used to flee LA to move to SF), and the fastest-growing county was Riverside.

The long-predicted flow of people from the coastal counties, which are fast becoming unaffordable except for the wealthiest, to the inland and mountain counties is taking place. When I was a kid, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties were weeds, wildflowers, and wide-open spaces, with sleepy towns and military bases interspersed along stretches of Highway 10. Now they are booming exurb factories, with no end in sight to the sprawl. When Steve and I visited last year, that sprawl was in evidence everywhere, from the wide, spacious, pedestrian-free boulevards of Ontario to the gleaming sparkly bustle of Palm Springs International Airport to the spooky, walled-off “gated community” enclaves of Rancho Mirage.

I find myself wondering where in California anymore would be a tolerable (and affordable) place to live.

My presentation was serviceable; it was supposed to clock in at 5 minutes and the professor signaled when I was going over the clock (which I don’t think she did with others who seemed to go over 5 minutes). I suppose that there were some advantages in going first (there were 19 presentations of 5 minutes each today, with a similar number scheduled for next week, and I had volunteered to go first), the biggest of which is that the nerves and the butterflies were quickly dispensed with. The disadvantage (or one of them) was that I got to see what others did with their presentations after I had already done mine, which meant that I couldn’t adjust my style in response.

Most everyone else’s were very good, excellent in some cases, but the difference was that mine, I think in retrospect, was kind of all over the map (given the topic I chose, that was probably inevitable). It was synthesized, but maybe it was a little too synthesized, maybe not reliant enough on scholarly journal articles and research. Oh, well. It’s done.

Now there is the final homework in 503, studying for and taking the 503 final, and finishing and presenting the looming Comm Studies paper.

I went to Ambrosia this morning to sit and do some last-minute prepping for my final 643 presentation. A grad seminar (apparently in Mideast politics, because every other word was “Islam” or “Baathist”) was holding court at a bunch of tables in a circle in the back. I sat at an empty table next to them and did my presentation outline on a legal pad while they pontificated. Meanwhile, a GSI sat at the table in front of me and held office hours with several of his undergrad students.

The Lecturers’ Employee Organization held a one-day walkout today to protest what it terms the University’s intransigence in addressing bargaining issues that the union has been pursuing with the university since last August, including salary, benefits, and “job stability” (i.e., tenure). Naturally, neither the local news coverage nor the position papers put forward by the union and the university has shed any light on the realities of the situation, and I don’t know enough about the history of the dispute to express an opinion about the walkout, so I won’t.

The picketers did not block any of the entrances to the library complex or West Hall. I don’t know what I would have done if they had; I suppose my instinct would have been, of course, to honor the picket line. I probably dishonored the strikers by not taking the recommended day off. If I had not had my final presentation hanging in the balance (the professor did not reschedule her class, nor, according to a firm letter sent out by the provost yesterday, was she or any other faculty member supposed to, which is of course one form of leverage that the university has in its arsenal), I would have taken the day off. I suppose my acts were selfish; I wouldn’t argue with anyone who said they were.

It’s nice to know that there are good people in the world. I was in a rush this afternoon, picking up a slice of pizza on my way to work, and I knocked my tray onto the floor in the Union with my awkwardly-positioned backpack. The slice of pizza was dust. An undergrad woman walked over and helped me get the mess off the floor, smiled, and joked, “I’d still eat it.” Then the woman behind the counter at the pizza booth saw what had happened and gave me another slice on the house.