Twenty-two orbits completed as of midnight, what now?

Do you know the feeling when a day just feels out of step? It’s a general sensation of hunger, tiredness, or illness that never becomes acute enough to justify a direct response, but which just makes for a graying of your overall experience. Part of it can definitely be chalked up to my strange inability to sleep last night. Spending nights alternating between tossing in the dark and trying to read something soporific is reminiscent of years ago. It shows, I suppose, that we can regress as well as progress.

I spent the morning and the afternoon trying to move forward on some of the hegemonic stability theory reading for the core seminar. I spent a few hours doing the ‘read and wander,’ where you shift venues every chapter or so. Later, I spent about an hour talking with Bilyana. It was both pleasant and a reminder of a number of things that I am doing wrong here. My overall strategy of maintaining distance between myself and college life – which I often find threatening – is a rather crude one. It could benefit from some fine tuning. As for the hegemonic stability stuff, I will entomb myself in the SSL tomorrow to work on it, except when I take a stab at the STATA assignment with Claire.

Later this evening, I spent a few hours reading An Instance of the Fingerpost. The language, setting, and protagonist all remind me of the work of Oscar Wilde, such as I was reading in Vancouver earlier in the year. I remember sitting in the Delaney’s in English Bay, reading The Canterville Ghost and waiting for Meghan. Perhaps it is the descriptions of scientific experimentation that most evoke the parallel between the two. I remember walking with her afterwards, and then looking out across an unusually wavy False Creek at Vanier Park and the Maritime Museum. Anyhow, along with speaking with Bilyana, reading Pears’ book did much to lift the last part of today from the doldrums it was languishing in earlier.

One piece of good news from Africa came in today. In proper Kerrie style, she has exploded back onto the internet, posting a whole collection of entries written in Ghana. As my closest rival last year for most compulsive blogger, I am happy to have a new infusion of information from her.

On Thursday, it seems that I will be meeting a group of Canadians to take the bus to London for the reception for graduate students at the Canadian High Commission. If I remember correctly, Emily will be coming as well. It will be wonderful to get beyond the boundaries of Oxford, even if only for an evening. This week, I must also remember to get my booster immunization for mumps.

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