It couldn't come soon enough

My professors are very wonderful people. And I've got to hand it to them, they outdid themselves making sure I earned spring break. There were many times last week that I was certain I was about to lose my sanity. But who cares about such gloom and misery? All is well now.

I've been rather living it up. Lots of looking out the window. Now that might not seem like much, but it's quite the luxury for me. Used to do it all the time back in middle school. People always talk about the best thinking occurring in the shower. They are in fact mistaken. It's when you look outside. Don't know what it is about it, but there's something about the infinite expanse of the sky that brings all the great metaphysical, theological questions to mind and forces me to deal with them. And then below that, there's the random cars driving by and the occasional person walking down the street, and I wonder where they're going, and what their lives are like, and how it all fits together in the grand scheme of things. I really could just sit in my room for hours. It's sort of like a mental reboot. During school I never have time to contemplate my own ideas; I'm too busy thinking about what I'm assigned to think about. So having the opportunity to do so now, with all my friends gone, is quite nice. I can step back from things, and sort of look at my life as an outsider, and evaluate what's good about it and where I should try to change things.

And then there are all my books. The above picture is the pile I'm spending my time with over break. Some are for school, others are ones I'm almost finished with but didn't have the time to work on, others are simply ones I impulsively started reading. While people are on vacation for break, I'm traveling too. Visiting Florence at the turn of the century; sitting at Thoreau's table in his cabin next to Walden Pond; watching Jean Valjean become a new man during the aftermath of the French Revolution. That's what I love about reading. You get to live in a completely different world from the one you live in, but along the way, you find all the similarities between that one and your own. Watch out, I'm about to go off on a Great Ideas rant.......

So yup, much of my break so far has involved me sprawled out on the floor in my room, reading some rather wild books and trying to figure out things like the meaning of art or why God is repeatedly so good to such a waste of time as me (won't ever make much progress with that one), all while listening to indie music. Yes, I only now discovered the greatness of Pandora. Don't judge. Everyone else, have fun in Florida. I'm good here.