Monday, March 22, 2004
Happy Birthday!
(to me, that is.)
We interrupt the scheduled Japan tale continuation to bring you this announcement. It's my birthday! Yay! Originally, I was not so keen on having my birthday on a Monday, which this semester is basically a 12-hour work day for me, but it hasn't been so bad. Mark continued the theme of giving me weaponry for gift-giving occasions, my parents sent me a gift certificate to Amazon, and when I got home, they had sent me flowers, too! Irises, of course, for the purple.
I was surprised at the gift certificate, since I thought my trip to Japan on my daddy's SkyMiles was my present. Now I have to plot and plan how best to spend my new riches.
*rubs hands gleefully and grins maniacally*
Also note that since this is an even-numbered year, I am spending this birthday in the US. This means that I really am turning 24. Birthdays in odd-numbered years since I entered college have all been spent out of the US, in that strange removed timestream that separates my life, and thus do not really exist. Does this happen to anyone else? The time that I spend outside my home country, particularly living outside it, ends up surrounded by little bubbles in the chronology of memory, so all of my semesters at Grinnell run together, despite being broken in the middle by my semester in Chile, because Chile is not in the linear timestream, but instead out to the side. In any case, this means that I had a very hard time remembering how old I was during the years I was 19, 21, and 23, (Taiwan, Chile, and Japan, respectively.) I've kept up my in-out streak for 6 years of birthdays now, but it is beginning to look doubtful that I will be able to continue it, thanks to MSU's inconvenient spring break scheduling. Alas.
PS
Oh, yes, and should you care to interact with my students, they put commenting features on their blogs today.
(to me, that is.)
We interrupt the scheduled Japan tale continuation to bring you this announcement. It's my birthday! Yay! Originally, I was not so keen on having my birthday on a Monday, which this semester is basically a 12-hour work day for me, but it hasn't been so bad. Mark continued the theme of giving me weaponry for gift-giving occasions, my parents sent me a gift certificate to Amazon, and when I got home, they had sent me flowers, too! Irises, of course, for the purple.
I was surprised at the gift certificate, since I thought my trip to Japan on my daddy's SkyMiles was my present. Now I have to plot and plan how best to spend my new riches.
*rubs hands gleefully and grins maniacally*
Also note that since this is an even-numbered year, I am spending this birthday in the US. This means that I really am turning 24. Birthdays in odd-numbered years since I entered college have all been spent out of the US, in that strange removed timestream that separates my life, and thus do not really exist. Does this happen to anyone else? The time that I spend outside my home country, particularly living outside it, ends up surrounded by little bubbles in the chronology of memory, so all of my semesters at Grinnell run together, despite being broken in the middle by my semester in Chile, because Chile is not in the linear timestream, but instead out to the side. In any case, this means that I had a very hard time remembering how old I was during the years I was 19, 21, and 23, (Taiwan, Chile, and Japan, respectively.) I've kept up my in-out streak for 6 years of birthdays now, but it is beginning to look doubtful that I will be able to continue it, thanks to MSU's inconvenient spring break scheduling. Alas.
PS
Oh, yes, and should you care to interact with my students, they put commenting features on their blogs today.
