ugh I need a vacation

Sadly, I do not get one; on the other hand, vacations with toddlers don’t count anyway, seeing as a key component of vacations is, on one hand, sleeping in, and on another, experiencing life at the pace of your own choosing, which is to say, I would like to spend unaccounted hours at art museums and obscure operas and walk long miles to sit on a balmy hillside to drink wine at sunset, and none of these things are likely to happen any time soon.

I have finished several things and am mired in the grim Zeno’s paradox stage with too many others. I have decided that my least favorite job responsibility isn’t grant writing after all, but rather the kind of writing that is really editing other people’s technical drafts; guess what I have been doing all summer. All summer. I am so tired. (Guess which projects are still Zenoing. The lament of a tired academic: Several of nature’s people I know, and they know me; I feel for them a transport of cordiality. But never met I this fellow, attended or alone, without a tighter breathing: Zeno at the bone.) I give up on deadline frogging; I am too tired.

I have just started Nirvana in Fire. I am watching it with someone, which means I can’t watch it on random Wednesday evenings when I am wandering tired onto the Internet. This is a Hard Fate which I am attempting to bear bravely up under because I am only through episode 7 and it is so very exactly my jam. Waiting is very hard, and filling the intervening time by wallowing in old discussion posts is also out because pretty much all the plot is still spoilers! So far I am delighted by everyone, everyone in this bar, but especially Nihuang, and I am rooting very hard for Nihuang and Lin Shu to ride off into the sunset together but I don’t exactly get the impression that this is what canon has in mind.

I had some vague ambitions toward un-rusting the fic engines tonight, but I seem to have diverted myself into discovering that the heliacal rising of Arcturus is in October, thus requiring either a different symbolic star, some justification for why a seasoned military commander would start a military campaign in October, or a desperate reckoning of orbital precession to account for however long ago the First Age was nominally supposed to be and hope that it winds up in the spring. I have thus accomplished nothing of note except to learn some fragmentary elf astronomy and roll around in evocative old calendars, and now I am going to declare that a little space of vacation and go to bed.