In Re: Daylight Savings Time

I was certainly thankful for the extra hour of sleep this morning. It meant that sleeping late, taking a leisurely walk to Reading Terminal Market for a breakfast of crepes and pierogies (which, now that I write it, sounds weirder than it actually was), and getting the subway back to South Philly could all be accomplished before 12:30. However, I fear that this new-found light in the morning just means that the rest of the day will just be incredibly gloomy. Indeed, for those of us who don't get up early enough to appreciate the morning light (and I'm even up early by grad student standards), it means that we will live the rest of the year in darkness. That may be something of a metaphor for the way that my life will go over the next few weeks, as I struggle to complete another chapter, finish the last round of job and post-doc applications, and prepare for the end-of-the-semester grading crunch.

Oh, well. That's what I signed up for, I guess. I've decided that this year, I'm going to own it. Following the advice of Guthrie Ramsey, I've made a (frighteningly long) list of tasks that I need to accomplish over the next few days, and I'm resolved to complete them all and still have time to work on my dissertation chapter--the writing of which has actually gone rather smoothly over the last few days.

And besides, after Tuesday, I get a bit of a reprieve from the increasingly-gloomy mid-Atlantic. I'm flying to Los Angeles on Wednesday for the annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology. I've never been to LA, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing the city and to the conference. I've also just signed up for a Twitter account, @johnpaulmeyers, and I'm thinking of doing occasional tweets about the conference. I've got to put my money where my mouth is when I talk about the importance of new media, I guess.

Anyway, it's going to be 70 and sunny every day in Los Angeles, which sounds like a pretty good deal to me.