trip number two to the supermarket is the result of snowed-in food depletion and planned truancy from greek, for which i was only half-prepared, and, as it turns out, 2 hours before class, prepared for the wrong passages anyway. closer inspection of the aisles this time produced udon base, sweet beancurd (for stuffing with rice, as well as cooking with udon), more peanut soup, and tinned suan la tang and tinned eel (what i wanted was a whole eel fillet that i could grill in the oven downstairs, but it was but a foolish vain hope.) for some reason, even though von and yeen teck aren't coming till the 21st march, i keep thinking i'm buying food for them for this weekend. if they don't come i think i would have a nervous breakdown. although addy's friend urvashi who's here tonight will probably be able to come over on friday and have something too. struggling back with 5 heavy bags of groceries over heaps of shakey snow was a perilous undertaking especially when frequently forgetting which bag the eggs were in. when i had come home i sorrowfully restrained myself from touching the food. i would go to the dining hall for lunch, to save money, and to keep the food for a later time. thus resolved i looked at the dining hall menu online and hah! perfect! they were serving nothing that i ate today! so i got down to cook - there was half a pot of longan soup left from the morning so i brought that to a simmer but try as i might that special vortex that su-lin had instructed i create in attempting to poach my longan egg never happened, so i gave up and said heck, i don't want any strange eggy longan soup, and poured rice into to the mix. soon i had a pot of steaming egg-based lightly-longan-flavoured puffy rice. i told yanmei, who was online then, that it was really wu4 da3 cheng2 fan4. she thought it was horrible pun and said, essentially "cheng fan ni de tou!" in passing, why is it to express scornful disbelief in english you say "my foot!" but in chinese "your head!"? two ends of the body, and a switch of person!

going to meet urvashi's bus in a bit. not too cold out tonight! housing's finally shovelled off the snow in our corridor so it's possible to move again! fell down half a dozen times today though, as snow begins to get slippery. got a fat bruise on my knee and stubbed a finger. *nurse* von says i have got my priorities all wrong, but i explained that i have only got 60 lines of latin to translate, 2 mini essays to write, and the third book of de rerum natura to read by 9.30 tomorrow. assuming i don't fall asleep. which i likely will. hm. just the other night i dreamt that alison milbank was admonishing me and telling me what a disgrace i was. i woke up from that one shuddering, went back to sleep, and immediately had a second dream in which nohrnberg this time told me much the same sort of things. then i woke up again and decided that thesis has murdered sleep, and like macbeth, i shall sleep no more.

i'm surrounded by famous people. cristina cervone has won a huntington and is off to la for a month. she is so cool! she's also the first grad student i've ever met, outside of a class (as classmate or teacher), bob reeder gave me her contact, and i wrote her an email in third year to see if we could get together and talk about what it's like to be a medievalist in grad school. we went and sat in one of the gardens one cool november afternoon and talked. i remember the grass was still abundant and green and prickly and that her hair was very long, pulled over one shoulder and flowing down like a frozen waterfall. bob reeder, in addition to all those teaching awards he has just won, has been offered two jobs, one at providence college teaching shakespeare, and literature in a western civilisations course much like columbia's core lit-hum classes, and another in wisconsin. wish i were a grad student. they're cool :)