December

THE month of December was a strange throwback to the days of my youth (...makes me seem old). The awkward calendar year had me selling Christmas trees on the farm for a couple of weekends, a chore that I had missed out on (gratefully) for the last few years due to school. It's kind of cool, until you have to attach a 15ft tree to a Yaris using only twine and a helping of luck. "Keep it under 80!" I tell the drivers, half grinning. They smile back and wave, wishing me a happy holidays. If only they knew that I never passed my knot test in boy scouts...

Even a healthy snow and lucrative temps in the –20s couldn’t keep me inside and I logged more than a few hours outside on the Bruin. If anything, the cold weather kept me outside more. I don’t know why, but I find it invigorating, the cold. So many hate it, but it’s great. The placid air piercing any uncovered area of skin- just makes me feel alive (and grateful for carhartts!). It's awesome because, as long as your dressed appropriately, you won't get cold. As opposed to summer, where you can be naked and die of heat exhaustion...

I also did something that I can’t recall. I read a book -for fun. I couldn’t quite recall the last time I read a book purely for enjoyment, I think it goes all the way back to elementary school; before teachers started assigning boring books that took up my precious free time and discouraged me from reading more (I never finished The Great Gatsby, don’t plan to either). Some of the last I read were London’s classics and I even got through Clancy’s Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising when I was in 4^th grade (and understood them, for the most part anyway). I knew what a HEAT round was capable of before my classmates had grasped long division (though I still don’t know my parts of speech). The novel that got me through this past month was Pullman’s epic His Dark Materials trilogy, which pretty much dominated my mind with it’s awesomeness for the last three weeks, and before you go on calling it a children’s book, it’s not. Don’t let a lamesauce cinematic rendition of the first book fool you, this book is capable of being interpreted on many different levels some of which fall way above the PG-13 movie rating. The novel was epic in every meaning of the word. It was a perfect escape for me from reality. And I’m not one of those weirdo fantasy people either. As Byron states it so exactly, “I hate all things fiction…There should always be some foundation of fact…”

But the best part of my break- there was absolutely no math involved. That’s important for someone like me who trudges through a sea equations everyday. Hell, my math is so advanced; I jump with joy when I get to use actual numbers in a problem. But all good things must come to an end, I guess. I finished the book, and now I’m left in a sort of depressed trance as I think back over the book and try to interpret it all, make it all relevant to my life, and hope one day I can write instead of crunching numbers daily.

So it is with a heavy sigh that I conclude my vacation (from both school and reality) this night, settling into bed with the eclectic sounds of late-night EQX quietly streaming from horribly low fidelity alarm clock speakers.

I promise something cool next time.

_ttk3

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