I just looked down at a pile of papers on my office floor, and on one of them, it says in block letters "DON'T BLAME PANOFSKY!" What in the world prompted me to write that?

Random thoughts, in no particular order (and thus...actually random):

1. Clean up office so Panofsky quits distracting me.
2. Thanksgiving break was okay, even if half of it was spent apologizing for picking a fight with my partner.
3. You must wonder--if leaving is so hard, why even bother arriving? Save ourselves the trouble.
4. It is fucking cold here.
5. Two weeks plus finals.
6. No way to pull an A in Hindi short of getting more than 100% on the final. How statistically impossible is that?
7. This weekend will blow.
8. Garry and Amanda, cheese souffle, Farming Game. We are never getting a dog.
9. Homi Bhaba calls.
10. As does...whatever the hell the name of that book is that you're supposed to have read by Friday.
11. Radiators suck.
12.

Well, productivity has been low for the past few days, but I've decided I'm going to go with the assumption that the guy who invented vacations knew what he was doing. One or two (or three or four) days of rest and relaxation must be good for my mind. And if it's not, I don't want to hear about it. I'm not exactly at a point in my work where I should feel good about taking a break (1/2 way through one paper, 1/4 way through a second, haven't even thought about the third...and oh, those two presentations? I'll deal with them later), but I figure writing nothing at all has to be better than writing "I hate you all and wish you would die" over and over again. At least I can't go to jail for sitting around and doing nothing at this point.

So....thirteen weeks of graduate school and I'm already back in therapy. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, especially since I seem to be carrying a rather large load of "You Cannot Fail AGAIN" on my back these days. But still...thirteen weeks? Couldn't I have sucked it up for a least a semester before having a nervous breakdown? And really...crying in the counselor's office? What the hell is that about? I DO NOT cry in front of people. In the past thirteen years, the only person I've cried in front of is Catherine, and even that is has been rather infrequent. Before Catherine, I know I cried once in front of Chong. And I've cried in front of my family, but they were trying to provoke me into crying, so I don't think that counts. So, in the last twenty years or so, I've cried in front of exactly two people before today. Why couldn't I have kept that behavior up instead of bursting into tears, I don't know, all of two seconds into my therapy session? I really DO need my head examined.

If I was the kind of person who wanted to write a coded love letter, I would give the person I loved a copy of a much cherished book, identical in edition to the one I kept on my own shelf. I would write "17-1-1::38-9-1/56-15-14/57-4-22/1-1-4::19-6-21/69-6-5/13-7-8" on a piece of paper, slip it inside the cover, and hope they cared enough about me to decipher the code stored in the pages of a book written by someone other than me.

Here's my question on academic integrity:

If a professor assigns me a chapter to read, and I read it (twice), and I don't understand it (twice), is it cheating to go to the library and find the book so I can read the introduction and therefore have someone position/interpret the article for me? I somehow think it is, but I don't think it's going to keep me from doing it (more than twice).